Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2024

This paper investigates the connotations that terms from the field of particle physics acquire when they determinologise. Based on a study performed on a comparable corpus composed of texts that represent various specialised, semi-specialised, and non-specialised communicative settings in French, different types of connotations are identified. The analysis sheds light on the diversity of positive and negative connotations terms can carry in semi-specialised and non-specialised texts, and the multiple factors that can influence the emergence of these connotations are discussed.

While media coverage of climate change has been shown to imply selective knowledge transformation (Carvalho 2007; Brand & Brunnengräber 2012; Kunelius & Roosvall 2021), studies assessing the potential for climate experts’ terminology to acquire ideological undertones as it enters mediatic discourses are still scarce. Through this article, we aim to compare the meaning climate experts and the media give to terms pertaining to climate change in English discourses and to determine whether potential cotextual variation in the discourses produced by these two communities have ideological implications. To this aim, we use the deep learning algorithm Word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013; González Granado 2021) to identify terms whose cotext of occurrence is prone to high variability depending on whether it is included in a newspaper corpus on climate change or one composed of reports from intergovernmental organizations. We then rely on statistical tools from corpus linguistics to compare the main co-occurrences of two of the terms identified – adaptation and energy security –, which we combine with Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker et al. 2008) to interpret the variation in terms of meaning and ideological significance. Results suggest that the appropriation of expert terminology by the media does entail a certain degree of conceptual variation, which notably seems to allow for bringing issues of social justice, financing and energy transition into focus and assessing expert knowledge along those lines.

This paper explores the relationship between terminology, the popularisation of scientific and technical knowledge and ideology in the People’s Republic of China. Specifically, it presents a study that focuses on an online daily column entitled ‘Scientific & Technical Term of the Day’ (每日科技名词), a terminology popularisation project promoted by China’s contemporary political leadership and implemented through the digital institutional platform Xuexi qiangguo 学习强国.

Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of critical discourse studies and legitimation in discourse, as well as frame analysis and frame semantics, the paper presents an analysis of expository texts designed to complement the knowledge provided by terminographic definitions of the terms published in the daily column. The focus is on the framing of China and the Party-state in these texts, which, it is argued, can also be interpreted as legitimation strategies.

Representing specialized knowledge in the medical domain implies considering the dynamism of scientific and technological progress. The advancement of knowledge on diseases goes hand in hand with the reconceptualization processes undertaken by experts with consequent conceptual evolutions and possible variations of the terms used to designate medical concepts. Sometimes term variation is the result of a desire to avoid or overcome negative connotations anchored in medical terms, and leads to the creation of less evaluatively charged terms that carry a diminished ideological load.

This study illustrates the case of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a relatively under-/misdiagnosed medical condition which has been the object of multiple reconceptualizations by experts. We focus on the analysis of the conceptual evolution of BDD and the consequent variation occurring at the linguistic level. We adopt the theoretical assumption that terminology has a double dimension – conceptual and linguistic. Following on this assumption, the terminologist must examine both the experts’ conceptualizations of a given domain and the discourses produced by them in order to effectively represent the specialized knowledge of a specific subject field. To complete the analysis, we present how information about BDD is disseminated to non-experts through the analysis of a corpus of mass-media articles.

During the last decades, disability policy has undergone considerable changes at European level, evolving from a disregarded branch of social policy to an essential area centered on equal rights and non-discrimination. In this context, terminology and definitions have proved to be of pivotal importance since they can bear and impose more or less appropriate theoretical perspectives, depending on the prevailing ideologies within society in different historical periods (Priestley 2007). Drawing on the assumption that the way disability is linguistically and discursively construed at institutional level has a crucial effect on how it is experienced, the activities of supra-national institutions appear all the more central to how disability is structured in relation to social policy, change, and politics. Within the context of the EU, the European Commission seems particularly relevant since it plays a major role in policy development. In fact, although the Parliament can amend or veto legislative acts, only the Commission can propose new legislation.

This study concentrates on disability-related legislation and strategies – which increasingly shape the lives of about 87 million disabled people estimated to live in Europe – by investigating how disability is framed in the EU’s institutional discourse. Linguistic (qualitative and quantitative) analysis of two of the most recent documents issued by the European Commission (namely the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020 and the European Disability Strategy 2021–2030) is meant to explore the main principles through which disability is theorised and construed in relation to the dominant ideological system of beliefs and values (Drake 1999; Grue 2020). Against the backdrop of previous research (Waldschmidt 2009) which took into account EU disability-related documents over a time-span ranging from 1958 to 2005, this paper seeks to shed light on the way discourses about disability are created and perpetuated, to be then translated into policy outcomes in the last decades and the years to come.

This study takes a cognitive view of metaphor to investigate the terms designating vulnerable people used in two legal languages, namely English as used in the European Union and Mandarin Chinese. We applied a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor to explore the implicit connotations of the terms identifying different groups of vulnerable people (e.g., minors, disabled people, victims of human trafficking). The findings show that even when appearing in legal texts, many of the key terms for these groups are not objective, nor are they unbiased and detached from our subjective and bodily experience of the world. When these terms are connoted, they tend to have negative connotations, raising concerns about their social implications. This study highlights the entailments of embodiment theories for terminology and proposes that the identification of groups of vulnerable people is a social product motivated by unconscious relations of power rather than relations of assistance and reciprocity.