Principes formels et fonctionnels de la variation en terminologie

Abstract

The theory of terminology has to admit two temporal ways for the analysis of terms in the discourse: one concerns the synchronic aspect where variants present the same referential signifié, the other, which is diachronic, accounts for changes in meaning, and so permits us to reconstruct the historical development of conceptual structures. To enable us to deal with the (re)organization of the conceptual structures, we suggest that there is a dynamic word-concept relation within languages. The scope of this paper is the functional analysis of the terminology in the synchronic and diachronic axes of social discourses. Its purpose is to prove that scientific and technical as well as the popular terminologies do not belong exclusively to the synchronic axis of languages and that terminologies have their own history and contribute to the history of languages. KEYWORDS: Terminology, variation, languages in movement, synchronic and diachronic axes Relation terme-conceptEn guise de révision, il faut préciser que les termes sont des signes qui tirent leur fonctionnalité des langages de spécialité, conformément à la dynamique des langues; il s'agit d'entités qui varient, étant donné qu'elles font partie de situations communicatives distinctes; ce sont des éléments du lexique spécialisé qui connaissent des évolutions, par conséquent, il faut les analyser sur les plans synchronique et diachronique des langues (Cf. Faulstich 1995).En outre, un concept possède des caractéristiques spécifiques qui s'organisent par l'entremise de traits observables ou imaginables. Les traits regroupent

Variation as a cognitive device

“…It can be found in Halliday's (1985, Halliday andHasan (1976) work on cohesion in language and discourse, where he argues that one of the patterns of meaning of a text is its underlying given-new information structure, which consists of "the ordering of the text, independently of its construction in terms of sentences, clauses and the like, into units of information on the basis of the distinction into 'given' and 'new': what the speaker is treating as information recoverable to the hearer (given) and what he is treating as non-recoverable (new). " (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 17, 326) In Pecman (2012a) we have thus focused on the cases of terminological variation where the distribution of variants across a text points to a different type of behaviour.…”

“…Other authors, Dury and Picton (2009), used variation criterion as a tool for identifying neologisms. Faulstich (2000) and Freixa (2006) devised different typologies of terminological variation in relation to specialised communication. In works on terminology, variation has been thus studied from various angles.…”

On alternating pre-modified and post-modified nominals such as aspirin synthesis vs. synthesis of aspirin: Rhetorical and cognitive packing in English science writing

“…In those cases in which reformulation created instability, variation was often perceived as an anomaly, and thus as an exception to the required stability of specialised lexicons (Pecman 2012: 29-31). However, this tendency has been progressively abandoned by many terminologists, who have begun to examine the phenomenon of terminological variation in terms of its communicative purposes (Faulstich 2000, Temmerman 2000, Tercedor 2011, Pecman 2012, 2014, Humbley 2015.…”

The Pragmatics of Specialized Communication

“…Although in the same way as in general language, it is possible to establish reasons for terminological variation based on user-based parameters of geographic, temporal or social variation or usagebased parameters of tenor, field, and mode (Gregory and Carroll 1978), this is not the whole story. Faulstich (1998) underlines the need to analyze terms both synchronically and diachronically with a view to systematizing terminological structures which change over time. This would reconstruct the conceptual structures of the period of time analyzed.…”