CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CLUSTER EQUIVALENCE,
GENERAL LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE
FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES
BARBARA LEWANDOWSKA-TOMASZCZYK
Introduction
The following chapter develops the concept of cluster equivalence introduced
by the author in previous publications and exemplified there on general
language and in English-Polish parallel materials. The author argues for
the presence of a similar phenomenon in the case of terms used in
restricted domains in Language for Specific Purposes, typically defined as
a variety much less vague and indeterminate. The argument makes
reference to parallel examples of English-Polish technical and legal
language and presents sets of translational clusters of equivalence patterns
and collocational patterning of the form motor, typologically similar to
those identified in general language, in which the phenomena of re-
conceptualization, meaning approximation and displacement of senses are
present.
Incommensurability and the displacement of senses
The concept of inter-lingual incommensurability can be traced back to
Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Relativity Hypothesis (1956) and W.O. Quine’s
untranslatability thesis (1964). Languages portray the world in unique
ways and this is one of the reasons for the absence of one-to-one
equivalence patterns directly corresponding to the outside world. George
Lakoff (1987) and Cognitive Linguistics in general tread in the
predecessors’ footsteps and suggest that language systems are not only
unique in their modelling of the outside world but in the parameters they
employ, i.e., grammatical and semantic categories are incommensurable