Chapter 2. Term usage and socioterminological variation

Abstract

Terms get around. Try as we may to control them, they do not stay put inside their original sphere of activity. Experts in a given field have a mutual understanding of terms: they share their usage and meaning. However, when technical and scientific terms are used outside the boundaries of their “natural” environment, shared understanding is lost. A work of discursive negotiation and reformulation, well-described in the context of the popularization of science (Jacobi 1986, 1999; Mortureux 1988), becomes necessary to restore mutual comprehension. Reformulation depends on several factors: the terms involved, the context in which they are used, the textual genres in which they circulate, and the medium through which they are conveyed. In our chapter, we adopt a socioterminological stance to show that discursive negotiation takes a variety of forms, but also, significantly, it is not at work with any terms when terms enter new discourse communities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.