From term dynamics to concept dynamics: term variation and multidimensionality in the psychiatric domain

Abstract

Medical terminology is one of the most dynamic terminological domains, and the choice of one term instead of the other is not random, but the result of different perspectives towards reality. VariMed is a research project on medical term variants and its overall objective is to generate a multifunctional resource on the medical domain for linguistic research, translation and technical writing. In this paper, we propose a systematic way of extracting term variants from large corpora within the subdomain of Psychiatry and how to represent them according to cognitive and communicative parameters. Our aim is to discover if different conceptualizations, or different conceptually motivated term variants, of the same concept are preferred in expert or semi-specialized communication. A corpus on Psychiatry was compiled and classified according to user types. A grammar was designed in NooJ (Silberztein, 2003) in order to extract term variants based on the usual lexico-syntactic patterns accompanying synonyms (also known as; commonly referred to as, etc.). Corpus analysis results indicate that, from a cognitive perspective, term variants reflect the prototypical dimensions in which psychiatric disorders may be classified. From a communicative perspective, terms and dimensions can also be associated with user-based parameters.