Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | A border discipline in search of an autonomous status within language sciences, Terminology today remains deprived of a conceptual tool and a discourse based on objective methods of description. In reality, judging from the abundance of recent publications, Terminology theories are disparate and eclectic. Pessimists refer to a decline if not an outright identity crisis. They are not entirely wrong. What is needed is a state of the art. Those willing to pursue the course of the terminological thought soon notice the conflicts, the barriers, and the gaps. Nonetheless, real progress has been made, such as taking phraseology and the complete text into consideration, and putting into perspective sociolinguistic and cognitive aspects. A quick retrospective glance reminds us how researchers, even from early 1970, began benefitting from the interlinguistic approach (in the sense of differential linguistics) to detach themselves from axioms of the Terminology of Wusterian obedience and to demonstrate that terminologies were not as radically distant from the general language as some presumed, that they constituted complex polysystems that present, in a dialectical relation, both motivation and convention, monosemy and polysemy, analogies and anomalies, and synonymical concurrences. Since this is the time for assessments and perspectives, we will venture to reflect on the three levels of practice, praxeology and fundamental research. |
