Біологічна метафора в соціолінгвістичному дискурсі: терміни та експлікації

The article outlines a range of problems related to the formation of the corpus of Ukrainian sociolinguistic terminology, which is currently in an active process of development. On one hand, it is open to the assimilation of terminological concepts that have already been established in global linguistic practice, and on the other hand, it is ready to create new definitions on the basis of the Ukrainian language itself. Attention is given to the ways and methods of terminology formation, including reterminologization and metaphorization. The research focuses on a series of linguistic terms formed with the help of the «biological metaphor», which originates from the natural philosophy school in linguistics, according to which the history of language is considered as the life of language. The «biological metaphor» of language as a living (natural) organism is a productive model for understanding new concepts and an effective means of verbal assimilation of phenomena belonging to the field of sociolinguistics. Using examples of widely accepted linguistic terms such as «living language» and «dead language», the article demonstrates how some terminological concepts used by social or linguistic sciences, when entering the conceptual field of sociolinguistics, acquire different (broader or narrower) semantic content, thereby requiring semantic specification and narrow specialized interpretation. In our research, we considered the terms language revitalization, regenesis, language renaissance, and others that can be considered synonymous. All of them entered the scientific circulation with the development of a new branch of sociolinguistics — revivalistics, that is still often called revival linguistics, which is designed to develop methods of restoring languages, to study the practices of returning them to active use. Still under discussion are correct Ukrainian equivalents of the above term, such as відновлення мови (language restoration), відродження мови (language revival), and пробудження мови (language awakening). Illustrations from terminological dictionaries and scientific texts presented in the article serve as a discursive background that allows for tracing the paths of forming a particular term and making assumptions about explicativity as an integral stage in the process of terminology formation.