La multiplicité des chemins dénominatifs

Abstract

In this article, we explore the important role that motivation plays in term naming and we suggest that synonymy in specialized texts can be explained as a result of a multiple motivation that takes place during the naming process. Firstly, a short review on the topic of concept formation, naming and the concept-term relationship from different theoretical approaches to terminology is proposed. Secondly, a semantic analysis of the different naming alternatives for the same concept extracted from a bilingual French and Galician corpus on shellfish farming is carried out in order to show how terms are an access door to the understanding of a concept and how the different naming variants are complementary viewpoints on the same concept. We finally suggest in which way such an analysis can contribute to a better description and explanation of the phenomena of naming and synonymy in terminology.