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In:Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation
Edited by Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley and Aurélie Picton
[Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 18] 2017
► pp. 213–258

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Chapter 9
Term and concept variation in specialized knowledge dynamics

 | University of Granada
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tlrp.18.09leo
Variation is a relatively new area of study in Terminology, as traditional approaches initially relied on the univocity principle and represented concepts in static universal structures. This means that for a long time, neither term nor concept variations were regarded as important and were largely ignored. Nonetheless, specialized domains are dynamic, and dynamism is an inevitable source of variation. The same reality can be perceived in different ways, giving rise to different conceptualizations, which in turn cause different denominations to emerge. This is known as multidimensionality. This chapter explores this phenomenon by analysing its impact on term and concept variation. As shall be seen, term and concept variation, far from being unrelated, are the consequence of the convergent influence of multidimensionality, context, and dynamism in specialized domains.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Term variation in the psychiatric domain
    • 2.1Representing term variants in VariMed
    • 2.2Extracting term variants from a specialized corpus
    • 2.3Analysing dimensional variants
      • 2.3.1Dimensions and text types
      • 2.3.2Term variants and text types
      • 2.3.3Term variants and collocational context
  • 3.Concept variation in the environmental domain
    • 3.1Representing conceptual networks in EcoLexicon
    • 3.2Extracting hyponymic structures from a specialized corpus
    • 3.3Analysing multiple hypernyms
      • 3.3.1Intra- and intercategorial multidimensionality
      • 3.3.2Hypernym preference across subdomains
      • 3.3.3From multiple hypernyms to other semantic relations
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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