VARIATION AT THE STAGE OF FORMULATING TERMINOLOGY FOR A NEW SUBJECT AREA (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE DIGITAL SOCIETY REALITIES DESIGNATIONS)

The article considers the process of formal variation of terminological nominations (terms and term elements) of a specifi c vocabulary layer that is currently formed in the context of the Digital Society model implementation in Russia. The aim of the research is to identify the types and sources of variation in order to provide a scientifi c foundation for a comprehensive lexicographic description of this vocabulary in a specialized dictionary. The research material was mainly extracted from official documents and news texts on the website of the Ministry of Digitalization of the Russian Federation, the me dia bank “Integrum”, Russian National Corpus and social media. In total, we examined over 500 nominations. The research methods include all types of linguistic analysis of the words, as well as a poll and parsing of social media data. The research revealed variants that differ in their phonemic composition, inflectional features, relation to the category of animacy/inanimacy, graphic and spelling form. Particular attention is paid to units that have not been included in dictionaries (so-called absolute neologisms). The article indicates the frequency of one or another variant. The reasons for variation are mostly related to the origin of the terms. Borrowed terms undergo adaptation, similar to common words, and adapt to various subsystems of the receiving language (phonet ics, graphics, and spelling). Calques and neologisms created on the Russian language basis may vary in spelling, or be unstable in the animacy/inanimacy category. Over all, the variation of the Digital Society terminology reflects the stage of its formation. In further research it is supposed to develop recommendations to capture the variability of different types in a specialized dictionary as a basis for the subsequent codifi cation of terminology.