While media coverage of climate change has been shown to imply selective knowledge transformation (Carvalho 2007; Brand & Brunnengräber 2012; Kunelius & Roosvall 2021), studies assessing the potential for climate experts’ terminology to acquire ideological undertones as it enters mediatic discourses are still scarce. Through this article, we aim to compare the meaning climate experts and the media give to terms pertaining to climate change in English discourses and to determine whether potential cotextual variation in the discourses produced by these two communities have ideological implications. To this aim, we use the deep learning algorithm Word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013; González Granado 2021) to identify terms whose cotext of occurrence is prone to high variability depending on whether it is included in a newspaper corpus on climate change or one composed of reports from intergovernmental organizations. We then rely on statistical tools from corpus linguistics to compare the main co-occurrences of two of the terms identified – adaptation and energy security –, which we combine with Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker et al. 2008) to interpret the variation in terms of meaning and ideological significance. Results suggest that the appropriation of expert terminology by the media does entail a certain degree of conceptual variation, which notably seems to allow for bringing issues of social justice, financing and energy transition into focus and assessing expert knowledge along those lines.
{"title":"Climate knowledge or climate debate?","authors":"Pauline Bureau","doi":"10.1075/term.00076.bur","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00076.bur","url":null,"abstract":"While media coverage of climate change has been shown to imply selective knowledge transformation (Carvalho 2007; Brand & Brunnengräber 2012; Kunelius & Roosvall 2021), studies assessing the potential for climate experts’ terminology to acquire ideological undertones as it enters mediatic discourses are still scarce. Through this article, we aim to compare the meaning climate experts and the media give to terms pertaining to climate change in English discourses and to determine whether potential cotextual variation in the discourses produced by these two communities have ideological implications. To this aim, we use the deep learning algorithm Word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013; González Granado 2021) to identify terms whose cotext of occurrence is prone to high variability depending on whether it is included in a newspaper corpus on climate change or one composed of reports from intergovernmental organizations. We then rely on statistical tools from corpus linguistics to compare the main co-occurrences of two of the terms identified – adaptation and energy security –, which we combine with Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker et al. 2008) to interpret the variation in terms of meaning and ideological significance. Results suggest that the appropriation of expert terminology by the media does entail a certain degree of conceptual variation, which notably seems to allow for bringing issues of social justice, financing and energy transition into focus and assessing expert knowledge along those lines.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141737882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates the connotations that terms from the field of particle physics acquire when they determinologise. Based on a study performed on a comparable corpus composed of texts that represent various specialised, semi-specialised, and non-specialised communicative settings in French, different types of connotations are identified. The analysis sheds light on the diversity of positive and negative connotations terms can carry in semi-specialised and non-specialised texts, and the multiple factors that can influence the emergence of these connotations are discussed.
{"title":"Term circulation and connotation","authors":"Julie Humbert-Droz","doi":"10.1075/term.00075.hum","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00075.hum","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the connotations that terms from the field of particle physics acquire when they determinologise. Based on a study performed on a comparable corpus composed of texts that represent various specialised, semi-specialised, and non-specialised communicative settings in French, different types of connotations are identified. The analysis sheds light on the diversity of positive and negative connotations terms can carry in semi-specialised and non-specialised texts, and the multiple factors that can influence the emergence of these connotations are discussed.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"80 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141737818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Representing specialized knowledge in the medical domain implies considering the dynamism of scientific and technological progress. The advancement of knowledge on diseases goes hand in hand with the reconceptualization processes undertaken by experts with consequent conceptual evolutions and possible variations of the terms used to designate medical concepts. Sometimes term variation is the result of a desire to avoid or overcome negative connotations anchored in medical terms, and leads to the creation of less evaluatively charged terms that carry a diminished ideological load. This study illustrates the case of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a relatively under-/misdiagnosed medical condition which has been the object of multiple reconceptualizations by experts. We focus on the analysis of the conceptual evolution of BDD and the consequent variation occurring at the linguistic level. We adopt the theoretical assumption that terminology has a double dimension – conceptual and linguistic. Following on this assumption, the terminologist must examine both the experts’ conceptualizations of a given domain and the discourses produced by them in order to effectively represent the specialized knowledge of a specific subject field. To complete the analysis, we present how information about BDD is disseminated to non-experts through the analysis of a corpus of mass-media articles.
{"title":"Variation in psychopathological terminology","authors":"Federica Vezzani, Rute Costa","doi":"10.1075/term.00078.vez","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00078.vez","url":null,"abstract":"Representing specialized knowledge in the medical domain implies considering the dynamism of scientific and technological progress. The advancement of knowledge on diseases goes hand in hand with the reconceptualization processes undertaken by experts with consequent conceptual evolutions and possible variations of the terms used to designate medical concepts. Sometimes term variation is the result of a desire to avoid or overcome negative connotations anchored in medical terms, and leads to the creation of less evaluatively charged terms that carry a diminished ideological load. This study illustrates the case of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a relatively under-/misdiagnosed medical condition which has been the object of multiple reconceptualizations by experts. We focus on the analysis of the conceptual evolution of BDD and the consequent variation occurring at the linguistic level. We adopt the theoretical assumption that terminology has a double dimension – conceptual and linguistic. Following on this assumption, the terminologist must examine both the experts’ conceptualizations of a given domain and the discourses produced by them in order to effectively represent the specialized knowledge of a specific subject field. To complete the analysis, we present how information about BDD is disseminated to non-experts through the analysis of a corpus of mass-media articles.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141737887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the last decades, disability policy has undergone considerable changes at European level, evolving from a disregarded branch of social policy to an essential area centered on equal rights and non-discrimination. In this context, terminology and definitions have proved to be of pivotal importance since they can bear and impose more or less appropriate theoretical perspectives, depending on the prevailing ideologies within society in different historical periods (Priestley 2007). Drawing on the assumption that the way disability is linguistically and discursively construed at institutional level has a crucial effect on how it is experienced, the activities of supra-national institutions appear all the more central to how disability is structured in relation to social policy, change, and politics. Within the context of the EU, the European Commission seems particularly relevant since it plays a major role in policy development. In fact, although the Parliament can amend or veto legislative acts, only the Commission can propose new legislation. This study concentrates on disability-related legislation and strategies – which increasingly shape the lives of about 87 million disabled people estimated to live in Europe – by investigating how disability is framed in the EU’s institutional discourse. Linguistic (qualitative and quantitative) analysis of two of the most recent documents issued by the European Commission (namely the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020 and the European Disability Strategy 2021–2030) is meant to explore the main principles through which disability is theorised and construed in relation to the dominant ideological system of beliefs and values (Drake 1999; Grue 2020). Against the backdrop of previous research (Waldschmidt 2009) which took into account EU disability-related documents over a time-span ranging from 1958 to 2005, this paper seeks to shed light on the way discourses about disability are created and perpetuated, to be then translated into policy outcomes in the last decades and the years to come.
{"title":"Disability in EU’s institutional discourse","authors":"Maria Cristina Nisco","doi":"10.1075/term.00079.nis","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00079.nis","url":null,"abstract":"During the last decades, disability policy has undergone considerable changes at European level, evolving from a disregarded branch of social policy to an essential area centered on equal rights and non-discrimination. In this context, terminology and definitions have proved to be of pivotal importance since they can bear and impose more or less appropriate theoretical perspectives, depending on the prevailing ideologies within society in different historical periods (Priestley 2007). Drawing on the assumption that the way disability is linguistically and discursively construed at institutional level has a crucial effect on how it is experienced, the activities of supra-national institutions appear all the more central to how disability is structured in relation to social policy, change, and politics. Within the context of the EU, the European Commission seems particularly relevant since it plays a major role in policy development. In fact, although the Parliament can amend or veto legislative acts, only the Commission can propose new legislation. This study concentrates on disability-related legislation and strategies – which increasingly shape the lives of about 87 million disabled people estimated to live in Europe – by investigating how disability is framed in the EU’s institutional discourse. Linguistic (qualitative and quantitative) analysis of two of the most recent documents issued by the European Commission (namely the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020 and the European Disability Strategy 2021–2030) is meant to explore the main principles through which disability is theorised and construed in relation to the dominant ideological system of beliefs and values (Drake 1999; Grue 2020). Against the backdrop of previous research (Waldschmidt 2009) which took into account EU disability-related documents over a time-span ranging from 1958 to 2005, this paper seeks to shed light on the way discourses about disability are created and perpetuated, to be then translated into policy outcomes in the last decades and the years to come.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141746022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study takes a cognitive view of metaphor to investigate the terms designating vulnerable people used in two legal languages, namely English as used in the European Union and Mandarin Chinese. We applied a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor to explore the implicit connotations of the terms identifying different groups of vulnerable people (e.g., minors, disabled people, victims of human trafficking). The findings show that even when appearing in legal texts, many of the key terms for these groups are not objective, nor are they unbiased and detached from our subjective and bodily experience of the world. When these terms are connoted, they tend to have negative connotations, raising concerns about their social implications. This study highlights the entailments of embodiment theories for terminology and proposes that the identification of groups of vulnerable people is a social product motivated by unconscious relations of power rather than relations of assistance and reciprocity.
{"title":"Metaphors for legal terms concerning vulnerable people","authors":"Michele Mannoni, Silvia Cavalieri","doi":"10.1075/term.00080.man","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00080.man","url":null,"abstract":"This study takes a cognitive view of metaphor to investigate the terms designating vulnerable people used in two legal languages, namely English as used in the European Union and Mandarin Chinese. We applied a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor to explore the implicit connotations of the terms identifying different groups of vulnerable people (e.g., minors, disabled people, victims of human trafficking). The findings show that even when appearing in legal texts, many of the key terms for these groups are not objective, nor are they unbiased and detached from our subjective and bodily experience of the world. When these terms are connoted, they tend to have negative connotations, raising concerns about their social implications. This study highlights the entailments of embodiment theories for terminology and proposes that the identification of groups of vulnerable people is a social product motivated by unconscious relations of power rather than relations of assistance and reciprocity.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141737814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The terminological impact of pandemics","authors":"Maria-Cornelia Wermuth, Paul Sambre","doi":"10.1075/term.00068.sam","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00068.sam","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"112 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134908090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This study identified terminology used in academia and media relating to Covid-19 and traced its development across 20 months from a discourse dynamics perspective. The cross-corpus comparison identified significant differences between the two corpora in the use of terminology relating to Covid-19, thereby signaling the particularities of the two communities towards the same social event. The dynamic analysis reveals a non-linear trajectory in the use of terminology in both corpora and an evolving developmental pattern in the construction of the specialized text. The analysis shows that the use of terminology evolves with social change, which can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of terminology development. Methodologically, this study further demonstrates the viability of discourse dynamic approaches in analyzing the linguistic features of a social event.
{"title":"A discourse dynamics exploration of terminology for Covid-19 in professional and public discourse","authors":"Jihua Dong, Shuai Dong, Louisa Buckingham","doi":"10.1075/term.00070.don","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00070.don","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study identified terminology used in academia and media relating to Covid-19 and traced its development across 20 months from a discourse dynamics perspective. The cross-corpus comparison identified significant differences between the two corpora in the use of terminology relating to Covid-19, thereby signaling the particularities of the two communities towards the same social event. The dynamic analysis reveals a non-linear trajectory in the use of terminology in both corpora and an evolving developmental pattern in the construction of the specialized text. The analysis shows that the use of terminology evolves with social change, which can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of terminology development. Methodologically, this study further demonstrates the viability of discourse dynamic approaches in analyzing the linguistic features of a social event.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136381098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Terminological conceptual analysis can be applied to purposes beyond terminology work. This article presents a Frame-based Terminology approach adapted to analyse concepts and inform the content of entries in the Humanitarian Encyclopedia. It proposes a method for conceptual analysis by systematising the extraction of knowledge rich contexts (KRCs) around corpus querying tasks through semantic sketch grammars (SSGs) and macros with knowledge patterns (KPs). KRCs are curated manually, modelled into conceptual propositions, and combined with corpus metadata into unified datasets. The method was tested on epidemic and coronavirus and their results are presented. This study provides a preliminary model to operationalise the study of conceptual variation. It also identifies the areas of terminological conceptual analysis with the potential to be informed by other research methods towards creating a standalone methodology.
{"title":"Corpus-driven conceptual analysis of epidemic and coronavirus for the Humanitarian Encyclopedia","authors":"Santiago Chambó, Pilar León Araúz","doi":"10.1075/term.00069.cha","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00069.cha","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Terminological conceptual analysis can be applied to purposes beyond terminology work. This article presents a Frame-based Terminology approach adapted to analyse concepts and inform the content of entries in the Humanitarian Encyclopedia. It proposes a method for conceptual analysis by systematising the extraction of knowledge rich contexts (KRCs) around corpus querying tasks through semantic sketch grammars (SSGs) and macros with knowledge patterns (KPs). KRCs are curated manually, modelled into conceptual propositions, and combined with corpus metadata into unified datasets. The method was tested on epidemic and coronavirus and their results are presented. This study provides a preliminary model to operationalise the study of conceptual variation. It also identifies the areas of terminological conceptual analysis with the potential to be informed by other research methods towards creating a standalone methodology.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"33 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134908438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Viewing the conceptual dynamicity of terminology as a major challenge in translation practices, this article proposes a framework for studying conceptual deviation in terminology translation. A case study based on a multilingual parallel corpus of journalistic translation is carried out to examine the conceptual deviation in Chinese and Spanish translations of several COVID-19-related terms in health communication via international news media. The results suggest that conceptual deviation occurs to varying degrees in translation and the Chinese translation conceptually deviates more from the source text than the Spanish translation does. Based on the premise that conceptual deviation may occur because of the sociocultural constraints on journalistic translation as an activity of cross-linguistic and -cultural health communication, the causes and impact of conceptual deviation in terminology translation are also discussed.
{"title":"Conceptual deviation in terminology translation","authors":"Biwei Li","doi":"10.1075/term.00073.li","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00073.li","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Viewing the conceptual dynamicity of terminology as a major challenge in translation practices, this article proposes a framework for studying conceptual deviation in terminology translation. A case study based on a multilingual parallel corpus of journalistic translation is carried out to examine the conceptual deviation in Chinese and Spanish translations of several COVID-19-related terms in health communication via international news media. The results suggest that conceptual deviation occurs to varying degrees in translation and the Chinese translation conceptually deviates more from the source text than the Spanish translation does. Based on the premise that conceptual deviation may occur because of the sociocultural constraints on journalistic translation as an activity of cross-linguistic and -cultural health communication, the causes and impact of conceptual deviation in terminology translation are also discussed.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"40 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134908895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Since 2020, we have witnessed the emergence of new concepts and terms due to the pandemic outbreak. Some of them have even become obsolete in a short period of time whereas others are still misused despite standardization efforts. In this paper we study explicit denominative variation in the COVID-19 corpus, which consists of scientific articles released as part of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and is publicly available in Sketch Engine. First of all, variants for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and coronavirus disease 2019 were extracted by means of knowledge patterns (e.g., also known as ). The productiveness of knowledge patterns was analyzed and a set of 1,684 explicit variation excerpts were collected and manually annotated. A total of 371 variants were retrieved and organized in two polydenominative clusters (i.e., 177 for COVID-19 and 193 for SARS-CoV-2), which were then formally and semantically characterized by comparison with the established designations. Finally, possible causes underlying denominative variation are explored.
{"title":"Denominative variation in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset corpus","authors":"Valeria Benítez Carrasco, Pilar León-Araúz","doi":"10.1075/term.00071.ben","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00071.ben","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since 2020, we have witnessed the emergence of new concepts and terms due to the pandemic outbreak. Some of them have even become obsolete in a short period of time whereas others are still misused despite standardization efforts. In this paper we study explicit denominative variation in the COVID-19 corpus, which consists of scientific articles released as part of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and is publicly available in Sketch Engine. First of all, variants for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and coronavirus disease 2019 were extracted by means of knowledge patterns (e.g., also known as ). The productiveness of knowledge patterns was analyzed and a set of 1,684 explicit variation excerpts were collected and manually annotated. A total of 371 variants were retrieved and organized in two polydenominative clusters (i.e., 177 for COVID-19 and 193 for SARS-CoV-2), which were then formally and semantically characterized by comparison with the established designations. Finally, possible causes underlying denominative variation are explored.","PeriodicalId":44429,"journal":{"name":"Terminology","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136381095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}