Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research - Averil Coxhead 2018

Engineering trades: Fabrication
Vocabulary in the trades

The second Engineering trade in the LATTE project is Fabrication (Welding), and the focus of this chapter is abbreviations as specialised vocabulary. Fabrication is divided roughly into heavy and light areas of work. Fabrication includes welding, sheet metal work, boiler making, steel construction, and fitter-welder jobs. In an analysis of the specialised vocabulary of written Fabrication texts for the LATTE project, we found 53 common abbreviations (see Table 8.7 for 30 of the 53) and their meanings, organised alphabetically. Some of these abbreviations may well be used in other trades, such as AMP and Ar. Others are clearly closely related to Fabrication, such as AWS for the American Welding Society and GTAW which stands for Gas tungsten arc welding. Meanings were checked using dictionaries, fabrication websites and tutor checking.

The list of abbreviations is arranged alphabetically, which is useful for finding lexical items quickly. However, alphabetical lists of words can be problematic. While they make words easy to find, they do not necessarily provide the user with any useful guide to frequency of the words. Table 8.8 shows the top 25 items for Fabrication arranged by frequency and by alphabet to illustrate this point.

Word parts seem to play quite a major role in Fabrication texts. Some examples include over~, as in overload, overalls, overlap, overheat, overex-tend, overtight and breakover. Another striking aspect of Fabrication lexis, as with other trades in the LATTE project, is that this vocabulary ranges from general words used with a technical meaning through to particularly technical words, such as parallax, vanadium, tirfor and thermosetting. With highly specialised lexis such as these words, it is clear that it is no mean feat to develop lexical proficiency in the trades.

Table 8.7 Thirty common abbreviations in Fabrication and their meanings

Table 8.8 First 25 Fabrication words by frequency and by alphabet