Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2016

Novel metaphorical expressions are understudied in traditional approaches to terminology because they behave as sporadic units incapable of structuring whole discourse events. To show that this assumption is wrong, this paper presents a case study of novel bioeconomics metaphors in an academic marine biology research article (Landa 1998). They were analysed following the Career of Metaphor Theory (Bowdle and Gentner 2005), a framework for the description of novel metaphor in usage, and the text-linguistics approach to term description (Collet 2004), which suggests criteria for term definition that challenge the tenets of monolithic terminology models. The analysis of unexpected metaphors identified in the text suggests that these units should be considered proto-terms experienced as deliberate rhetorical and conceptual devices. Pragmatically speaking, the metaphors are part and parcel of the writer’s discursive strategy to communicate specialised knowledge to her peers. Conceptually speaking, the metaphors are essential building blocks of the article’s mental model.

This article studies a family of semantic relationships that is often ignored in terminological descriptions, i.e. opposite relationships that include, but are not limited to, antonymy. We analyze English and French terms classified in an environmental database as opposites (Eng. polluting; green, afforestation; deforestation; Fr. réchauffer; refroidir, atténuation; intensification) and revise this first classification based on typologies and criteria supplied by literature on lexical semantics, psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics. Our revised classification shows that diversified opposite relationships can be observed between terms. They also appear to display the same complexity as in general language. Finally, in some cases, the nature of concepts in the specific subject field must be taken into consideration.

This study explored the behaviour and functions of term variation in research articles in order to better understand the process of knowledge construction within texts. A semantic analysis of term variation in 19 Spanish-language psychology research articles was carried out. Variants were classified according to the semantic distance from the base term. Analysis revealed that term variation provides information about the concept’s content and its relationships with other concepts within the conceptual structure. Furthermore, an examination of the distribution of term variants across text sections revealed three rhetorical functions of term variation: a naming function, present in the title, abstract and keyword sections; an explanatory function, in the introduction and discussion sections; and a particularizing function, in the method and results sections. This analysis confirmed that intratextual term variation plays a cognitive and rhetorical function in research articles, helping to construct and transfer knowledge within the text and to realize the communicative purposes of the genre.

One of the most remarkable features of the legal English lexicon is the use of sub-technical vocabulary, that is, words frequently shared by the general and specialised fields which either retain a legal meaning in general English or acquire a specialised one in the legal context. As testing has shown, almost 50% of the terms extracted from BLaRC, an 8.85m word legal corpus, were found amongst the most frequent 2,000 word families of West’s (1953) GSL, Coxhead’s (2000) AWL or the BNC (2007), hence the relevance of this type of vocabulary in this English variety. Owing to their peculiar statistical behaviour in both contexts, it is particularly problematic to identify them and measure their termhood based on such parameters as their frequency or distribution in the general and specialised environments. This research proposes a novel termhood measuring method intended to objectively quantify this lexical phenomenon through the application of Williams’ (2001) lexical network model, which incorporates contextual information to compute the level of specialisation of sub-technical terms.