Chapter 12

Text genres and Terminology

Terminology is intrinsically linked to textual genres. Text genres became an essential component of terminological research and practice in the context of Corpus-based and Textual Terminology. These approaches placed a spotlight on specific terminological features according to genre types and made contrastive analysis possible with emphasis on genres, registers and, consequently, domains. This chapter discusses the way Corpus-based and Textual Terminology have paved the way to placing genres in the core of terminological analysis. It explains why textual genres are often looked on as fuzzy categories. It also presents the various studies in Terminology involving textual genres and the general hypotheses, basic principles and the methodologies used therein. Finally, it examines the impact of text genres on theoretical and applied Terminology and on the future research in Terminology.