Terminologie et nomination : un rapport définissant?

Naming is one of the main issues in terminology. The question is whether terms are created consciously, and can thus be planned, or if, on the contrary, terms are created as a discursive act, and thus more or less unconsciously. This question has divided the experts ever since terminology as a discipline came of age. The distant origins of terminology are to be found in nomenclatures and taxonomies, and the first expressions of term theory are steeped in standardizing endeavours, thus favouring the first hypothesis. More linguistically orientated studies however, focusing on corpora containing emerging terminologies, stress the various acts of language which finish up by creating a new term. After a period of neglect, naming has returned to the centre of terminologists’ preoccupations, thanks to work in cognitive terminology, and to other detailed study on scientific articles, opening the way to a synthesis of the two viewpoints.