Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 2, Issue 1, 1995

This article aims to show the link of the concept of diversity with terminology. This fundamental relationship may seem paradoxical since one of the main goals of terminology is that of unification and standardisation of terms. However, it should be borne in mind that terminology has to take reality into account. This reality appears to be diverse in its nature. Terminology was born from diversity and owes much of its expansion to the diversity of its approaches, applications, functions, and training; this diversity is the natural outcome of facing up to a concrete and existing reality. Thus it can be seen that contrary to what might be common belief, the goal of absolute uniformity of scientific terms is not desirable as it reflects an artificial and Utopian process. In fact, idealising terms does not bear much resemblance to reality. Nor does it to terminology.

In the literature there are no standard meanings for words like aspect, attribute, characteristic, feature, property, and quality. Because the denoted concepts have not been well understood or differentiated, the terminology is highly unsettled, resulting in significant mis communication, imprecision, and confusion in scientific discourse. Ascriptive ontology is the name given here to the science of basic types of aspects, those ubiquitous facts by which we know, describe, and represent things of interest. Aspects underlie virtually every scientific construct, from theories, models, meronomies, taxonomies, concepts, and laws to simple empirical facts. Specifically in terminology, aspects underlie all types of definitions, concepts and concept systems. A new comprehensive taxonomy of aspects is proposed, and concise, uniform names are suggested for the respective concepts. Based on this taxonomy, a new semantic network notation called ETA is briefly introduced.

The article explores the basic conceptual structure patterns of definitions and contrasts them with their linguistic realisation. A better understanding of the linguistic possibilities of expression can lead to more sensible rules and proper patterns for definitions that can be used in authoring packages for the writing of definitions.

The role of verbs in definitions is very complex. In general discourse, the function of declarative sentences or propositions is to report events happening to participants, with verbs encoding the events and nouns the participants. In definitions of concepts, verbs and nouns are used to express, in the form of simple (stative) propositions, basic facts concerning processes, states, or actions that relate to the concepts mainly realised in noun form. While the nouns in the definienda can represent any class of concept, in this article it is argued that the verbs occurring in the second part of the definition, in finite form in the relative clause, can only represent activity or relation concepts because they serve to express states or conditions of existence, actions or executed processes.

This article reports on part of a larger project on neologisms in the field of biotechnology. The research concentrates on English neologisms and how they influence the Dutch special language of molecular biology and genetic engineering. The origin of "splicing " is traced in its new usage in biotechnology, and the realisation of the associated concepts in Dutch is examined as a special case of limited borrowing in secondary term formation.

The rapidly changing political and economic circumstances in central Europe during the late 1980s served as a strong natural motivation for attempts to present this reality as accessible and inviting in order to encourage foreign investment. It was also a reason why the Polish Society of Economic, Legal and Court Translators published in the early 1990s a series of translations of Polish economic law into English as source material for creating a consistent system of legal terminology called POLTERM. The following is a description of the efforts that go into creating a uniform terminological system, the institutional frame-work of this project, the source material used for its creation, the rules and procedures of the secondary term formation, and certain problems encountered in the work of terminologists and translators.

Word combinations (phraseological units, collocations, etc.) pose practical as well as theoretical problems in terminology and in linguistics in general. This paper examines how specific word combinations can be stored in computerized reference tools. The focus is on word lexical groups in special languages and their representation for translation purposes. Two scenarios concerning verb + noun combinations are analyzed. The first scenario consists of assigning a specific database to word groups. The second describes the implementation of an interface between a verbal database and existing mono referential databases (term banks) using hierarchical conceptual relationships.