Principes formels et fonctionnels de la variation en terminologie

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.