The prescriptive school of thought in terminology holds that terms should be fixed items and should not be prone to variation. More recently, however, descriptive studies have begun to reveal that many terms do in fact have variants. This poses a challenge for language professionals such as translators and terminologists, who need to decide which form of a term to use in a given context. This article explores one specific type of variant that occurs frequently in medical language — variants that can be formed by combining elements of a term in a different order (e.g. cardiovascular vs. vasculocardiac). By studying such variants in corpora, we have identified some regular patterns that appear to reveal conceptual, linguistic and social motivations behind term choice. An understanding of these factors may help translators and terminologists to choose the most appropriate term.
2018. Análisis de la función cognitiva de la variación denominativa en la Lexicografía brasileña: patrones conceptuales de variación y distancia semántica entre las variantes1. Meta 63:2 ► pp. 467 ff.
Dahm, Maria R.
2018. A socio-cognitive investigation of English medical terminology: dynamic varieties of meaning. Lexicography 4:1 ► pp. 81 ff.
Faber, Pamela & Pilar León-Araúz
2016. Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context. Frontiers in Psychology 7
2010. Recherche en terminologie et applications pratiques : quelques axes de collaboration avec des partenaires industriels danois. Revue française de linguistique appliquée Vol. XIV:2 ► pp. 73 ff.
2011. L’apport des corpus spécialisés en terminographie multilingue : le cas des groupes nominaux de type Nom-Adjectif dans la langue médicale. Meta 56:2 ► pp. 391 ff.
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