Towards New Ways of Terminology Description. The sociocognitive approach

Based on an empirical study of categorisation and lexicalisation processes in a corpus of scientific publications on the life sciences, Temmerman questions the validity of traditional terminology theory. Her findings are that the traditional approach impedes a pragmatic and realistic description of a large number of categories and terms. Inspired by the cognitive sciences, she develops an alternative. The main principles of this new theory imply: a combined semasiological and onomasiological perspective; only few categories can be clearly delineated; form and content of definitions vary according to category types and user's requirements; synonymy and polysemy are functional in special language and an diachronic approach is unavoidable. In a last chapter the author shows how the methods and principles of the alternative approach are applicable in terminography and how this is going to have an impact on software for terminological database construction.