ARCHIVED Neology and Phraseology as Terminology-in-the-Making

 

Consult the Pavel in ...

Silvia Pavel
Terminology and Linguistic Services
Secretary of State, Canada

1. The growth of Languages for Special Purposes (LSP)

   Technical and scientific vocabulary is witnessing a massive upsurge of new terminologies brought about by the emergence of new scientific paradigms, the spread of high-technology applications, and the rapid growth of interdisciplinary research. At the same time, LSP communication in any given field is less and less confined to specialists in the same domain. It now reaches the academe across previously disparate disciplines, extends to public administration and the private sector, permeates industry, and sends its message through the mass media to the general public.

   The scientist’s drive towards discovery, modern society’s high regard for innovation, the trend towards interdisciplinarity, and the new information technologies all contribute to a faster transfer of knowledge between various fields in various languages, and to an increasing number of people having a greater say in the shaping of Languages for Special Purposes. Besides the specialists themselves, many of these people are language professionals, i.e. translators, terminologists, technical writers and editors, LSP teachers, and journalists.

   Our analysis of LSP neology builds on the central distinction drawn by G. Holton (1988:405) between "the science-in-the-making, with its own vocabulary and modes of progress as suggested by the conditions of discovery... and science as institution, textbook science, our inherited world of clear concepts and disciplined formulation." More precisely, it deals with terminological research related to the growth of science-in-the-making and to the endless shift from thematic variation to conceptual stability.¹

2. Conceptual change

   If inherited scientific knowledge can be said to form semantic networks whose nodes represent concepts connected by stable links (kind-of links, instance links, rule links, property links, part-whole links, etc.), then conceptual change may be seen as weakening certain links, rearranging nodes in the network, or requiring the addition/deletion of some links and nodes. However, conceptual changes rarely occur in isolation, and important ones involve restructuring and replacing whole conceptual networks.

   These transformations are the object of intensive Artificial Intelligence research on knowledge representation and machine-learning. As such, they should interest terminologists at the stage of conceptual analysis. For, unlike delimiting inherited concepts, the task of identifying the concepts that emerge from thematic hypotheses consists in tentatively pointing out features that distinguish them from existing ones, and determining their links in a conceptual network while knowing that both features and links are subject to deliberate modification, and may prove to be factually wrong. Also, conceptual shifts usually bring about wholly justified, if impermanent, terminological shifts.

   In a research paper on the theory of conceptual changes P. Thagard (1988:5) summarizes the stages that led to the replacement of Stahl’s phlogiston theory by Lavoisier’s oxygen theory in the following terms: "In 1772, Lavoisier had only a vague idea that air could combine with metals. By 1774 he had much more evidence that this was true, but was still very unclear whether it was air or a part of air that combined. By 1777 he knew that an eminently breathable portion of the air was responsible, and by the 1780’s he had conceived it as an element constituting part of the atmosphere. Over the same years he went from some vague ideas about air relevant to calcination and combustion (1772, 1774) to a hypothesis that he clearly saw as a rival to the phlogiston theory (1777), to a fully worked out theory that obviated the phlogiston theory (1783)."

   Thagard’s analysis also illustrates the making of neologisms: at each concept-formation stage, Lavoisier introduced new terms and expressions to account for eroded links, additions, deletions and replacements. Thus, in 1772, he was describing the unknown substance as an "elastic flexible fluid of a particular kind which is mixed with air". In 1777, when this ingredient was isolated, phlogiston theorists called it ‘dephlogisticated air’ while Lavoisier preferred ‘pure air’, ‘eminently respirable air’, described it as ‘the portion of air the most salubrious and the most pure’, and distinguished it from ‘atmospheric air’, ‘fixed air’ and ‘mophette’ (nitrogen). In 1780, he coined the term ‘principe oxygine’ (from Gr. ‘acid forming’) on account of his belief that all acids contain oxygen. The concept of ‘oxygen’ revolutionized chemistry while continuing to develop after Lavoisier.

3. Correctness and acceptability

   In terminological research, some aspects of human language deserve, and usually receive, careful consideration when newly coined technical and scientific terms are dealt with. One such aspect is theoretical: natural languages are viewed as systems of signs whose functioning is governed by combinatory rules. These signs and rules provide discursive representations of what is perceived and conceptualized as ‘the nature of things’ around us. It is against this well known, and highly formalized, background that the correctness of a new LSP term is always tested (Miller 1991:103–169).

   Assessing the correctness of new LSP terms means verifying lexico-semantic adequacy, conformity to morpho-syntactic rules (derivation, composition, abbreviation), and functionality with respect to existing terminology while gathering rather than pruning seemingly contradictory or ambiguous data. The completeness of linguistic knowledge is critical in assessing correctness.

   For instance, the study of large LSP vocabulary corpora has confirmed not only the predominance of neosemanticisms over formal neologisms but also the previously neglected regularities of term polysemy and the ways in which context determines the meaning of individual terms. Integration of such considerations into present work methods helps avoid the unwarranted discarding of semantic neologisms as ambiguous. By the same token, greater knowledge of the structural similarities and dissimilarities of say, English and French, precludes misconstruing new French terms as anglicisms, and unsuspected anglicisms as well-formed French terms.

   Another aspect that is gaining momentum in terminological research is of a more practical nature: languages are seen not only as social tools that human communities have created and are continually refining for communication purposes, but also as agents that constantly condition individual behaviour by virtue of social interaction in historically, geographically, and culturally defined settings.

   In order for a new concept or a new theory to be properly understood, and subsequently verified or falsifed, its explanation has to observe tacitly agreed upon conventions² that regulate the ways in which metaphors, narrative patterns, rhetorical structures, syntax, and semantic fields affect thought and LSP discourse. This is the somewhat fuzzier background against which the acceptability of a new term is usually tested by a community.

   It is for instance perfectly acceptable to borrow terms from the language in which the concepts have been created, or to render them in a target language by means of descriptive phrases for lack of a single term. But even if borrowing and circumlocution account for many newly coined terms, at least in the first stages of knowledge transfer across language barriers, semantic neologisms are much better as to acceptance rate. Unlike correctness however, the dynamics of acceptability seems highly unpredictable, almost chaotic. For what is acceptable here or now may not be so elsewhere or tomorrow.

   The relationship between correctness and acceptability, and their respective impact on the moulding of new terminologies are not yet clearly understood. Many grammatically correct terms never find acceptance within a professional community while others become accepted only after a long, uphill battle. Incorrect ones may be readily accepted for no apparent reason, and whereas some of these are as readily replaced, others become impossible to uproot from current usage. On the other hand, perfectly correct terminological creations that have been spontaneously adopted by a professional community for their originality and transparency are sometimes officially rejected by editors of specialized literature and other language workers, seemingly for lack of compliance with more common if uninspired term formation patterns. Conversely, officially recommended terms gather dust inside expensive hardcovers, while parallel neologisms flourish in spoken usage.

   Finding out the causes, the patterns or regularities hidden behind such apparent randomness is one of the new tasks facing terminologists. Its neglect hinders standardization efforts, leads to inconsistencies among vocabularies dealing with the same field of expertise, and partially explains their incompleteness.

   One way of achieving this task is to consider recent developments in sociology and to focus on social interaction as the basic unit of analysis of terminological acceptability. Modern theories of social interaction (Turner 1988) conceptualize it as involving three kinds of processes: motivational processes that mobilize and energize interactive behaviour; interactional processes of mutual signaling and interpreting with symbols; and structuring processes of repeating and organizing social interactions in time and place.

4. Motivational dynamics

   In a scientific or professional community, motivational processes can be viewed in terms of needs and values: the need to express emerging knowledge by analogy with commonly accepted experience or facts; the need to name and rename objects for a specific use or common interest; the need to identify with, and be recognized by, a group through shared values and cultural attitudes.

   Thus, the first concern of terminological research at the stage of concept identification should be to single out the central themes mobilizing the specialists’ attention, the intellectual traditions responsible for their thought patterns, the models, analogies and metaphors they use to grasp conceptual attributes. These are the catalysts of concept formation and, as such, the main source of semantic neology in any field of expertise.

   In artificial intelligence for instance, the description of the brain as ‘a theater of mental representations’ led quite naturally to the choice of such terms as scripts, scenarios, actors, thematic roles, settings, frames and props for naming the various components of knowledge representations. These choices in turn, brought about the adoption, into AI vocabulary, of verb collocators from the phraseology of the theater. The highly figurative stock exchange terminology centers on meteorological and zoological metaphors that attract and orient the designation of new concepts. Likewise, the terminology of non-linear geometry, also called ‘the geometry of nature’, abounds in metaphorical names evoking shapes of natural vs. man-made objects: coastlines, isles, continents, mountains, galactic clusters, snowflakes and flowsnakes, - sponges, stars, trees, bows, carpets, Swiss cheeses, soaps, staircases and tiles (Lauwerier 1991).

   As a noted AI theorist unequivocally stated, "Each science is differentiated from others not merely by the set of phenomena it claims as its object of study, but also by the approach it takes (the science’s view of those phenomena, its paradigm). If we view Man as an actor whose internal thought processes can’t be investigated, then we are called ‘behavioral psychologists’, and we study human behavior. If we view Man as a brain, as a piece of hardware built out of neurons, then we are called ‘biologists’, and we study neuro-physiological responses. If we view Man as a machine, as an automaton, then we are called ‘cyberneticists’, and we investigate mathematical properties of feedback networks of simple components. If we adopt the view of Man as ‘processer of symbols’, then we are working in the field of Artificial Intelligence. No one view of Man is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; each is adopted because from it we can build a model, which in turn has some practical consequences and uses." (D. Lenat 1977:259)

   The need to name and rename objects is illustrated by Benoît Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry, whose mother tongue is French and working languages, English and French. Reflecting on the language of fractals, he explains his motivations in coining new terms in both languages, as follows: "C’est par nécessité que mes travaux semblent regorger de néologismes. Même lorsque les idées de base sont anciennes, elles avaient été si peu essentielles qu’on n’avait pas éprouvé le besoin de termes pour les désigner, ou qu’on s’était contenté d’anglicismes ou de termes hâtifs ou lourds ne se prêtant pas aux larges usages que je propose." (Mandelbrot 1984:53)

   Awareness of the values, implicit stocks of knowledge and imaginary worlds shared by a professional community also helps terminologists to realize, and to convey to LSP vocabulary users, the irresistible appeal of strange­looking but culturally motivated new terms that an outsider might take for typographical errors. Science fiction, fairy tales, cartoons, mythology, movies, classical music and literature such as the novels of James Joyce and the stories of Lewis Carroll do inspire many a scientist’s whimsical neologism. Such are M.Gell-Mann’s ‘quarks’, Laurière’s SNARK and ‘djinns’, Mermin’s ‘boojums’, or science fiction-inspired ‘to grok’ and ‘to gronk out’ in computer hacker jargon (Pavel 1991:45).

5. Interactional dynamics

   Conceptual and terminological changes do not occur by decree but by degrees, through "negotiations at multiple sites among those who generate data, interpret them, theorize about them, and extrapolate beyond them to broader cultural and philosophical significance" (Hayles 1991:4). During these negotiations the creator of a new term ritualizes,³ frames, and stages situations (symposia, informal discussions, written materials) for signaling it to other actors (colleagues, publishers, grants officials, translators, vocabulary makers and users) so that they can interpret and react to it. He tries to persuade and expects his creation to be validated.

   A typical illustration of these interactional processes is the adoption of the literary neologism ‘boojum’ in physics, where it designates the concept defined as "any surface point singularity the motion of which can catalyze the decay of the supercurrent of liquid helium-3 (Mermin 1990:11). The author of the definition selected this designation upon finding himself describing this singularity as causing the supercurrent to "softly and suddenly vanish away". In The Hunting of the Snark, L. Carroll had described Boojum as a variety of Snark which does exactly that to anyone encountering it.⁴

   The rituals of opening the interaction involved first mentioning the neologism with quotation marks in a footnote and second, making the reason of his choice known to the other people working on the same concept who had proposed calling it ‘flower’, ‘flower texture’, ‘bouquet’, ‘fountain’, and even SOSO, an acronym for ‘singular on surface only’. Organizing this interaction consisted of publicly using it in symposia, frequently mentioning it in abstracts and texts of various papers and speeches, deriving specific boojums (circular, hyperbolic), new nouns and adjectives (boojology, boojumish), a tentative latinate plural (booja) which was criticized and later replaced with ‘boojums’, and pleading with editors not to expunge it from printed texts. Closing the interaction was accomplished by ‘boojum’ being accepted in the pages of the authoritative Physical Review Letter after its creator had proved that this neologism highlighted a pertinent attribute of the concept, that the metaphor could not be construed as mixed, that the word had already been adopted in the French, German, Russian, Italian and Swedish translations of The Hunting of the Snark, that it appeared in Webster’s Dictionary, was easily pronounced in foreign languages, and that it already was widely used and understood internationally as a scientific term.

   The framing implied carefully selecting the appropriate behaviour in every situation according to the status, influence and personality of the other actors, while staging meant running his own campaign and orchestrating his peers’ interventions in time and space so as to ensure that boojum received full recognition.

6. Structuring processes

   In comparative terminological research, interactional processes involve the terminologists as institutional or individual researchers/vocabulary makers; subject feld specialists as validators; and translators, other language workers and the general public as terminology users. These roles are frequently mixed or interchanged since many terminologists may be themselves specialists in a subject field; all specialists are terminology users and some also author dictionaries; translators usually have both specialized and linguistic knowledge; and so on.

   A terminologist’s interactions with the others entail studying specialized literature, identifying networks of concepts, collecting related designations and definitions, consulting specialists as to recommended usage and structuring this material in vocabularies according to the needs expressed by specific categories of users. Feedback from validators and users serves to update terminological products and contributes to the preparation of terminology standards.

   In comparative terminology, when evolving concepts and new terms come out in a source language, the task of finding or creating acceptable equivalents in the target language, becomes a collective one. Individual solutions are gathered, recorded, compared, interpreted and disseminated to interested parties in pre-vocabulary form so as to elicit feedback from, and facilitate informed choices by, users. The repeated alternation of those activities that intensify information exchanges and those that orient its dissemination promotes a high degree of interconnectivity within a cooperative network and facilitates consensual acceptance of neologisms.⁵

   A promising attempt at structuring such a collective task is being made by the International Network of French Neology and Terminology (RINT) in which terminologists from French-speaking countries scan specialized French texts in advanced technical and scientific fields for newly coined terms.

   For each concept, all proposed designations, definitions and contexts are to be sent to the Canadian terminology bank TERMIUM, systematized on terminological records, circulated to interested specialists in each member country for comments, returned to TERMIUM researchers for integration of comments received and preparation of a collection to be published in France and made available to French-speaking users. This repository of neologisms will be periodically updated in the TERMIUM bank with new data being generated, structured by terminologists, and disseminated by RINT to interested language workers and subject-field specialists.

7. Phraseology, neology and effective communication

   Beyond terminology stricto sensu, neology and phraseology can be viewed as factors of a more general sociolinguistic requirement, i.e. the effectiveness of specialized communication. That this requirement does not get the attention it deserves, is often deplored in scientific circles: "Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining. The insistence on bland impersonality and the widespread indifference to anything like the display of a unique human author in scientific exposition, have not only transformed the reading of most scientific papers into an act of tedious drudgery, but have also deprived scientists of some powerful tools for enhancing their clarity in communicating matters’ of great complexity. Scientists wrote beautifully through the 19th century and into the early 20th. But somewhere after that, coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader." (D. Mermin 1990:XII)

   Part of the problem seems to lie with borderline interpretations of what constitutes effective communication, and with the power of their advocates to effectively impose one view at the expense of another regardless of the situational variables of LSP discourse. For those who believe that language only exists as an instrument, communication is effective to the degree that it is lexically stereotyped and syntactically simplified. In such a minimalistic view, figurative language, idiomaticity and analogy should be eliminated from LSP writing in favor of a reduced syntax, a conventional vocabulary and an unequivocal definition of concepts. For those who are aware that language shapes even as it articulates thought, effective communication means clarity of message and forceful exposition of ideas by all means available, figurative language, idiomaticity, and analogy included. Interestingly enough, the former interpretation has been encountered among editors and teachers of technical writing while the latter is often shared by science writers and translators.

   From a terminological perspective, meeting the requirements of effective communications means incorporating the social-interaction aspect into neology work methods as outlined earlier, and giving a phraseological dimension to terminology research by describing the actual functioning of terms in LSP discourse.

   As far as ‘established’ terms are concerned, specialized vocabularies designed for translators (Pavel 1991) still consist mostly of nouns and noun phrases from which verbs and verb phrases are conspicuously absent. As for LSP phraseology, i.e. the inter-phrasal combinations of terms and words in actual LSP discourse, it is at best given cursory consideration. More often than not, it is completely ignored on the mistaken assumption that LSP collocations are not unlike common language ones.

   This state of things is already changing in comparative terminology where significant efforts are being made to integrate LSP phraseologisms into specialized vocabularies as lexical solidarities or polar combinations of collocators and term bases. The study of LSP phraseology inspires new approaches in vocabulary making, such as the actors-actions dictionaries proposed by Kukulska-Hulme (1990); it allows the description of processual concepts with verb characteristics, whose structuring is not necessarily similar to that of nouns (Picht 1990:49); and is instrumental in understanding how concept-theme transformations trigger the lexicalization process, i.e. the transformation of certain types of phraseologisms into terminological units and the subsequent clustering of new phraseologisms around new terminological units (Pavel, forthcoming).

   This new role of phraseology as terminology maker takes root in the view that thematic propositions or hypotheses embody increasingly complex theoretical and experimental variations on the relatively unchanged basic themes found at the origins of scientific thought (e.g. stability vs change, order vs disorder, symmetry, time, space, evolution vs devolution); that scientific discourse reveals the subtle nuances of such variations by means of particular phrasal choices; that LSP lexicalization is the reflection, in language, of the transition from the thematic variation characteristic of new scientific paradigms to the conceptual stability of textbook science.

   K. Hayles’s (1991) interpretation of the classical and modern thematic variations on ‘order vs disorder’ might help to illustrate the ways in which new turns of phrase generate meaning, condense into stable expressions of those meanings and become first synonymous neologisms, and then terms that give birth to new terms. According to this interpretation, Western science and culture traditionally viewed ‘order’ as the state of being classified, analyzed within rational discourse. ‘Disorder’ was lack of order, chaos, true randomness that could only be expressed through statistical generalizations.

   In common English, ‘disorder’ has ‘chaos’ for synonym and is defined as ‘gaping void, yawning gulf, chasm, abyss’, i.e. a negative state to be overcome before creation can occur. This negative value may be due to the predominance of two-valued logic in Western culture: if ‘order’ is good, its opposite, ‘chaos’, is bad. Multi-valued logic may prevail in other cultures. In Taoist mythology, for instance, the destruction of ‘chaos’ is not the dawn of civilization but bespeaks the inability to accept a different ‘other’: ‘chaos’ is the necessary other, the opaque turbulence that challenges and complements the transparency of ‘order’. Taoist thought is based on four-valued logic: chaos (not order) is distinct from anti-order.

   In today’s science, ‘chaos’ is conceptualized as ‘extremely complex information’, not true randomness’ but ‘orderly disorder’, a meaning very different from the entrenched scientific and common ones. A ‘science of chaos’ is therefore not a contradiction in terms. Since its goal is to understand behaviour so complex that usual mathematic methods fail to formalize it, it is also called ‘science of complexity’ and ‘sciences of complexity’ because it includes meteorology, irreversible thermodynamics, epidemiology, nonlinear dynamics, the stock market, and many more.

   ‘Chaos theory’ is based on the discovery that - hidden within the unpredictability of ‘chaotic systems’ - are ‘deep structures of order’. It is part of a paradigm shift because it constructs ‘chaos’ as ‘not order’ that may either lead to ‘order’ as it does in I. Prigogine’s ‘self-organizing systems’, or it may have ‘deep structures of order’ (Mandelbrot’s ‘fractals’) encoded within it.

   The term ‘chaos’ itself is controversial within the ‘science of chaos’. When it became associated with ‘nonlinear dynamics’ (also called chaotic dynamics), practitioners considered it imprecise, sensationalized, unnecessarily confusing, and avoided it. Thus ‘chaotic dynamics’ became ‘complex dynamics’. While losing ground in favor of ‘deterministic disorder’ within the scientific community, ‘chaos’ gained credibility in popular science and was retained in literary theory precisely because of its ambiguity.

   In semiotic studies, ‘chaos’ led to the creation of the neologism ‘chaotics’ meaning various attitudes towards ‘chaos’ such as poststructuralist ones. The world envisioned by ‘chaotics’ is said to differ from that of Newtonian mechanics by its unpredictability, complex irregularity and by the idea that small fluctuations may lead to dramatic random changes following predictable paths (the butterfly effect), as opposed to the Newtonian idea that small causes lead to small effects.

8. Creativity and mimesis in terminology making

   Whether observed in scientific discoveries, artistic innovations or lexical creativity, concept-theme feedback loops display remarkable similarities. Thematic propositions incessantly question and undermine the concepts designed to grasp them. The modes of their instantiation in people’s minds cannot be anticipated, the changes that they undergo through social interactions cannot be foretold. Like all dissipative systems, thematic propositions acquire new features, forfeit previous ones, restructure internally and diffuse outwardly. "C’est la conséquence de l’exemplification : aux traits jugés pertinents pour la définition du concept, le thème ajoute un réseau d’idées associées (par analogie, contraste, contiguïté...) qui ne sont pas d’abord considérées comme entrant dans sa définition, mais qui pourront ensuite devenir essentielles pour maîtriser le thème greffé sur ce concept, et qui finiront peut-être par faire retour sur le concept initial pour le mettre en question." (Bremond 1985:416)

   In comparative terminology, studying the development of new concepts from thematic propositions and their LSP designations serves more than purely theoretical purposes such as discerning relationships between the creativity of developing concepts, building explanatory sentences about these concepts, and making up terms to name or rename them. It helps terminologists to suggest and advance terminologically viable solutions to the denominational problems encountered by translators at grips with scientifically original texts. But what kind of creativity should they cultivate?

   M. Boden (1991) defines creativity as a thought-process that involves "the exploration of conceptual spaces in people’s mind and their transformation into new ones. To be creative, one must be able to map, explore, and transform one’s own mind. There is no such thing as ‘ex nihilo creativity’. No scientist, craftsman, or engineer has ever made an artefact out of nothing. Conceptual anteriority, intuitive unpredictability, positive evaluation and deliberate modification of ideas are distinctive features of creativity."

   If an extreme sensitivity to nuances of meaning, perception and feeling is indeed a distinguishing mark of a creative mind (Briggs & Peat 1989:194), then terminologists and translators need to be creative. For, assuming that they already possess sufficient background knowledge in their field, they must truly understand the transformations operated by thematic propositions on existing concepts and on their relationships in order to express them by means of a new designation.

   H. Poincaré considered creativity to evolve in four phases: preparation, incubation, insight and verification. In the preparatory phase, the creator makes conscious, but often unsuccessful, efforts to solve a problem by familiar methods. In the second phase, the conscious mind is focused elsewhere, while tacit knowledge or unconscious ideas "continually combine with a freedom denied to waking, rational thought" (Briggs & Peat 1989, Boden 1991). The flash of insight that follows the period of unconscious mental work is unexpected but comes as a conscious experience. In the last phase, the creator returns to deliberate problem solving, in order to itemize and test the new conceptual insights. The problem solving aspects of this process are all present in the terminological search for an appropriate designation.

   For A. Koestler (1964:199), creativity consists in associating two conceptual matrices which are not normally associated, and may even seem incompatible. The more unusual the bissociation, the more creative its result. He pointed out that many creative acts involve connecting seemingly unrelated elements, "seeing an analogy where no one saw one before" or generating it by a stretch of the imagination. At the same time though, the recognition and generation of analogies must satisfy three conditions: at least some of the elements present in the two conceptual matrices must have a one-to-one mapping into one another; the elements must have similar meanings; some mapping must exist between an element of the new matrix and a central element of the parent one.

   This Star-Trekish frame of mind is much weaker in terminology practice. Terminologists have to recognize analogies already generated and named in a source LSP and simply transfer them into the conceptual setting of the target language. Scientific analogies being usually obvious, they rarely have to be carried over by the mapping of peripheral features, by ‘poetic licence’ as it were. In this respect, terminologist’s creativity is more akin to that of a performing artist who transfers, interprets and adapts, than to the creativity of an inventor.

   Understanding the relationships between correctness, acceptability and effective LSP communication on one hand, and the workings of scientific and linguistic creativity on the other, is important for at least four reasons. It allows terminologies to recognize proper new terms from improperly formed ones and to assess their acceptability based on phraseological preferences in thematic LSP discourse. It allows for the cooperative dissemination of terminological information and for its subsequent standardization by national and international bodies. It helps language planners and terminologists, particu­larly comparatists working in more than one language, develop their own lexical creativity based on the formal knowledge of term creation mechanisms, on the constant interaction with specialists and assimilation of their conceptual and cultural background, and on the mimesis of their lexical creativity, motivations, needs and values. Finally, it provides the means necessary for enhancing the conceptual coherence, the lexical consistency and social acceptance of terminologies-in-the-making.

Notes

1. "Entre le thème qui varie le concept, et le concept, qui unifie le thème, s’institue dans nos têtes un mouvement de navette quasi instantané qui explique la difficulté où nous sommes de séparer clairement les deux notions. Libéré du corset définitionnel, plongé dans un bain de contaminations empiriques, le concept devient thème; mais aussitôt repris par la réflexion et asservi à la nécessité de se figer dans une appellation commode, le thème tend à se résorber dans le concept" (Bremond 1985:416).
2. These conventions are variable mixtures of semiotic factors such as objective interpretation, affective perception, esthetic interest, political context and preconceptions.
3. In J. Turner’s terms, ritualizing refers to the use of stereotyped sequences of actions "to open, organize, and close an interaction. Framing denotes the process of cognitively delimiting the range of acceptable behaviors in a situation. And staging denotes the use of physical props, the division of space, and the relative positioning of actors" (1988:108).
4. "Goodness knows why ‘boojum’ suggested softly and suddenly vanishing away to Carroll, but the connection having been made, it was inevitable that softly and suddenly vanishing away should suggest ‘boojum’ to me. I was not unaware of how editors of scientific journals might view the attempt of boojums to enter their pages; I was not unmindful of the probable reactions of international commissions on nomenclature; nevertheless I resolved then and there to get the word into the literature"(Mermin 1990:5).
5. For a sociological description of how such structuring processes operate, see J. Turner (1988:150). His model uses six basic concepts: categorization, regionalization, normatization, ritualization, routinization and stabilization of resource transfers.

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