Dynamics and Terminology

The urge to understand all aspects of human experience more and better seems to be one of the motives underlying cognitive development in many domains of human existence. Understanding more and better is at the basis of knowledge creation and extension. One way of getting access to how understanding comes about and how knowledge is the result of a continuous dynamics of understanding and misunderstanding is by studying the cognitive potential and the development of natural language(s) and more particularly of terminology, in specialized domains. In this volume on dynamics and terminology, thirteen contributors illustrate that human cognition is a dynamic process in a variety of socio-cognitive and cultural settings. The case studies encompass a panoply of methodologies and deal with subjects ranging from the dynamics of legal understanding in multilingual Europe, over financial, economic and scientific terminology in several cultural and linguistic settings, to language policy issues in multilingual environments. All thirteen contributors link the dynamics of cognition to the creative potential of language as a repository of past and present experience in cultural settings and to the creation of neologisms in domain-specific languages. Attention is given to the functionality of indeterminacy, vagueness, polysemy, ambiguity, synonymy, metaphor and phraseology. In this volume terminology is researched and discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining insights developed over the last decades in communicative terminology, socio-terminology, socio-cognitive terminology, cultural terminology, with tools and methods from cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, frame semantics, semiotics, knowledge engineering and statistics.

Thorsten Roelcke, Technische Universität Berlin, in Fremdsprache, October 2015:
The current volume provides a good overview of current terminology research. [...] The present papers follow a new and more realistic concept of semantic variation in terminology: languages for specific purposes in general and their lexicon in particular are not necessarily homogeneous or monosemeous but are heterogeneous and follow various cognitive and communicative circumstances, because human interests differ in the various social, economic, legal, technical, scientific and other surroundings. From this perspective, the volume edited by Temmerman and Van Campenhoudt may be considered as an important step towards a more pragmatically focused and cognitive terminology research.