CONCEPTUAL FIELDS WITHIN SPECIALIZED VOCABULARIES. TOWARDS A TAXONOMY OF THE ENGLISH POLICE EQUIPMENT
CONCEPTUAL FIELDS WITHIN SPECIALIZED VOCABULARIES. TOWARDS A TAXONOMY OF THE ENGLISH POLICE EQUIPMENT

Summary/Abstract: This paper is an attempt to correlate the main social and semantic shifts in the conceptual field of police equipment, as a central area of policeterminology. We will find why unlikely terms such as clay, X-rays, pincers and grenades are related to policing, what kind of special technology is called CAD, CCTV, sound spectrograph or taser, and how they aid law enforcement; we shall find how bumper beepers relate to audio technical surveillance and breathalyzers to traffic control. Most words in the conceptual field of police equipment can be identified, and main semantic and lexical changes can be revealed with the help of historical dictionaries. The method employed is categorisation, which enables us to view the conceptual field of equipment as a relatively stable mental representation of the world, but also subjected to change according to different instantiations and acknowledgements throughout time.

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