Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2014

In Languages for Specific Purposes (LSPs), variation and term formation are often seen as related phenomena, variation being interpreted as a sign of neology. In scientific discourse though, variation can play specific roles, thereby giving a different dimension to neology as a linguistic process than generally implied in terminological studies. The well-known referential function, consisting of creating new designations for naming new concepts, can be set aside in scientific texts to create space for what we define as the cognitive function: a situation where a scientist purposefully employs term variation as a means for theorising and better explaining a given concept. We argue that Halliday’s “grammatical metaphor” and “given-new” information theory provide an interesting background for understanding scientific term formation processes, and the ensuing issue of terminological variation. Consequently, in this article, we try to place the phenomenon of neology and of terminological variation within the framework of discourse analysis, by devising a method for probing sequential behaviour of terminological variants across text sections. Additionally, this study aims to improve building lexical resources within the ARTES terminological and phraseological multilingual database project, which serves as a support for developing lexicographical and translational skills in students in specialised translation.

Wine tasting notes constitute a specialized genre in the field of Oenology, with their own rhetoric and language. However, the language of wine tasting notes is by no means as specialized as that of most other specialized genres. Indeed, while there are dozens of terms used to describe and evaluate wines, there are only a limited number of words that are used exclusively or primarily for describing taste. In this study, we will first examine how wine literature attempts to analyze the descriptors used in wine tasting notes. We will then study a number of common wine descriptors in English and Spanish in the context of the nouns that they collocate with, in order to determine how specific or general these descriptors are in their use and meaning. On the basis of their collocability, we will categorize the descriptors into three categories and then analyze the meaning components of those descriptors that fall into the most general category.

In this paper, we describe a methodology used to create a test corpus for the evaluation of term extractors. This methodology relies on term annotation: terms in a corpus on automotive engineering are selected based on specific criteria pertaining to the terminological setting as well as linguistic and formal properties of terms and term variations. The test corpus accounts for the variety of ways in which terms are realized in running text, and provides a means of automatically evaluating the relevance of term candidate lists produced by term extractors. Due to the XML annotation scheme used, the corpus can be customized, e.g. by filtering out some of the annotated terms based on the type of term or term variation, or frequency. In this paper, we focus on the methodological aspects of this work.

In times past, drugs often derived from plants and were quite naturally named after them. Nowadays, considering the significant economic issues at stake (Dutchen 2009), pharmaceutical companies increasingly entrust brand agencies with the naming of their products (Kenagy 2001). In this article, we offer to analyze the names of some brand and generic drugs, exploiting the French VIDAL dictionary, the British National Formulary and the US FDA corpora, with the aim to bring to light the evolution of lexical trends over the last century. Whilst doing so, we wish to demonstrate that, in the field of pharmacology, the process of naming is nowadays not so much underlain by a legitimate need for clarity and scientificity but rather by marketing strategies some of which prove to be misleading for patients. Considering the now international dimension of the pharmaceutical industry, drug names are often the same around the world. Yet, there are exceptions, which we point out and explain. Furthermore, we deemed interesting to underline the extent to which medicines are part of our everyday life by pointing out nicknames that patients tend to give to their treatments — usually sedatives, neuroleptics and the like — and metaphors they may resort to in English and in French. We conclude with the acknowledgement that medicines are henceforth like any other goods, whose financial stakes are such that, besides developing forceful new names, the pharmaceutical industry goes so far as inventing new diseases (disease mongering) to increase its market share (Even and Debré 2012).

In this paper we propose an analysis of phraseological verbs in specialized discourse in order to establish syntactic and semantic characteristics likely to indicate the transmission of specialized knowledge. By adopting and adapting theoretical and descriptive proposals existing for general language, we consider elements from the relation between the verb and its arguments (such as argument structure and thematic roles) and aspects from the arguments themselves (such as semantic features and termhood). Through the detection of combined features and behaviour patterns of occurrences, we are able to more specifically establish which characteristics allow us to recognise the terminological use of phraseological verbs and which kind of information is the more relevant to its conveyance.