Terminology as a system of knowledge representation: An overview

Terminology has an important role in the framework of specialised knowledge, especially as regards its elaboration, representation and transmission through verbal language. This study focuses on the nature of knowledge that is organised in terminological collections. Terms are interpreted as the units where the mental, linguistic, communicative, and referential facets of specialised knowledge coalesce. Terminology schools belonging to different traditions have attributed distinct values to the notion of term and to its content, as a consequence of the underlying terminological and linguistic theories used as reference (§ 2.). Accordingly, terminology theories and applications display the prevalence of either a prescriptive or descriptive approach; the former characterises the General Theory of Terminology, the latter is typical of contemporary schools related to socioterminology, textual terminology, the sociocognitive approach, and the communicative theory of terminology (§ 3.). An analysis of the nature of knowledge as represented in terminology works makes it possible to recognise the importance of representing the system of knowledge through a relational scheme of concepts and terms which allows the user to delineate the definition of the single units of knowledge (§ 4.). This model, which has been outlined since Wüster’s theory as a hierarchical frame of relations and dependences, can be described in terms of an ontology, also as a result of the recent integration of terminology with information science. Even though ontology offers a model of representation of specialised knowledge which is relatively neutral from the linguistic and cultural point of view, this structure can be integrated with the cognitive, sociological and pragmatic facets of terms, which have acquired a growing importance in contemporary terminology. In this way ontology remains a basic component of a satisfactory representation of concept systems, even when the analytical perspective is interlinguistic and intercultural, as is the case with the applications that follow the termontography method.