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Terminological dynamics and semantic neology in French terminology of infectious diseases

The case of HIV/AIDS-related terminology

ORCiD logo with link | Ostravská univerzita
Published online: 23 April 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.25031.hol
Abstract
The article contains some remarks on the dynamics of infectious diseases and HIV/AIDS-related terminology in terms of its diachronic, diatopic, and diastratic variability and polysemy, its penetration into other fields, and the determinologisation of certain specialized terms. The terminological dictionary Vocabulari multilingüe de la sida served as the basis for the analysis of semantic shifts. The French terms based on metaphors and metonymies were analysed, sometimes taking into account other Romance languages. The corpus contained a number of shape, colour, orientational, and functional metaphors, and metonymies based on cause–effect, part–whole, and discoverer–discovery relations. Metaphors and metonymies tended to correspond across Romance languages as a result of calquing, a process frequently used in secondary terminologisation.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Corpus and methodology
  • 2.Dynamics of HIV/AIDS-related terminology
    • 2.1Terminological variability
    • 2.2Transterminologisation and determinologisation
  • 3.Semantic neology
    • 3.1Metaphors
    • 3.2Metonymies
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (49)
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