Facing the huge amount of textual and terminological data in the life sciences, we present a theoretical basis for the linguistic analysis of chemical terms. Starting with organic compound names, we conduct a morpho-semantic deconstruction into morphemes and yield a semantic representation of the terms' functional and structural properties. These semantic representations imply both the molecular structure of the named molecules and their class membership. A crucial feature of this analysis, which distinguishes it from all similar existing systems, is its ability to deal with terms that do not fully specify a structure as well as terms for generic classes of chemical compounds. Such `underspecified' terms occur very frequently in scientific literature. Our approach will serve for the support of manual database curation and as a basis for text processing applications.