Contenu du sommaire : Genèses de la terminologie contemporaine (sources et réception)

The contribution of Austrian philosophy to the development of the theory of terminology : theory of knowledge, ontology and theory of the object. The article focuses on the contribution of Austrian philosophy in the 19th century and the early 20th century to the development of the theory of terminology. Between 1860 and 1910, F. Brentano and his disciples A. Marty, A. Meinong, developed a multi-disciplinary philosophy (between psychology, linguistics, ontology, and epistemology) that started from Aristotle's categories and resulted in a variety of theories and orientations that are today considered as crucial pre-requisites to ontology engineering, computational philosophy of science, and terminology studies. Husserl's phenomenology and theory of meaning and Carnap's constitutional ontology theory are also discussed in this re-construction of the development of the epistemological foundations of the theory of terminology as Eugen Wüster developed between the early 1920s and 1976.

Lexicography and terminology at the turn of the 19th century : La Grande Encyclopédie. Our purpose in this article is to analyse the practice of “pre-terminology” within a corpus ; it is interesting from this point of view because it was constructed at the frontier of the 19th and 20th centuries and was a collective work carried out by scientists and specialists : La Grande Encyclopédie. One of the initiators was the famous chemist Marcelin Berthelot. The article pertains to the emerging terminographic practice within a dictionary corpus underlain by the claim of scientific triumph and the will to spread contemporary knowledge.

The Vocabulaire philosophique of Lalande (1900-1923) : specialized lexicography or prototerminology ? The analysis of lexicographical principles which govern the organisation of Lalande's Vocabulaire is used : 1. to retrace the context of the terminological reformism commonly found in philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, by referring to two traditions, rationalistic and nominalistic ; 2. to examine in what measure Lalande's undertaking of the Vocabulaire comes under a prototerminography.

Terminological stabilization and transfer of notions between psychology and linguistics (1900-1940) In the course of their history, notably when borrowed from a foreign field, scientific terms and concepts undergo transformations which seem to follow a law of “ontological lightening”, going with a loss of their theoretical background. The paper gives instances of this in Tesnière, Bühler and Koschmieder, focusing on the relations between psychology and linguistics. In Koschmieder, the “case of coincidence” (= performativity in his terminology) is bound with a grammatical issue (the use of Slavic aspect), and a theory of cognition borrowed from the Psychology of Thought. This suggests that concepts are incorporated in “argumentative sequences”. Thus the paper draws an analogy between mechanisms in lexical truncations and in terminology. Context truncations do preserve the “reference” of the concepts (that is to say empiric identification procedures), but not their “signified” (their relations with other concepts in a specific theoretical context).

Terminology of terminology. Metalanguage and reformulation in Wüster's Einführung in die allgemeine Terminologielehre und terminologische Lexikographie. The large amount of positive and negative reactions expressed about the works of the Viennese School of terminology, urges one to reexamine its important (main) sources and first of all, Eugen Wuster's texts. Starting with a corpus extracted from the Einführung gathering the synonymic pairs emerging from the reading of this handbook, one can study the art of reformulation used in this text and analyse how terms are being introduced in a well designed construction. These terms appear like real keywords, representative of important themes in the theory of terminology. It is interesting to find that a holder of the terminological theory resting on the principle of biunivocity uses repeated (and paradoxical) synonymy.

Towards a pluralistic reception of Wüster's terminological theory : an annotated reading of successive forewords of the handbook Einführung in die allgemeine. Terminologielehre und terminologische Lexikographie Eugen Wüster's posthumous handbook of terminology has had three separate editions in the original German, and each has its own preface, written by various authorities involved in the field. Analysis of these prefaces shows an unmistakable progression. The first simply recounts how the handbook was completed following the author's death. The second presents the handbook as a response to those who criticize Wüster's theoretical stance. The third places the work in the bigger picture of the history of linguistics and presents it as the inauguration of a new branch of linguistics applied to language for special purposes. These viewpoints, completed by contemporary German-language sources, shed light on the way Wüster's legacy is perceived in Central Europe and thereby put French-language criticisms into perspective.

The role of terminology in language planning : genesis and description of the Quebec approach. When the plan to restore the quality and place of the French language in Québec took shape in the 1950s, it was vitally important to resume the analysis of French vocabulary used in Québec to enable it to provide a counterweight to competition from English, especially by injecting into French essential technical terms. It is against this backdrop that terminology flourished in Québec, particularly starting in 1970. This article first reviews the sociological and legislative context that engendered the priorities of the mandate assigned to the Office de la langue française. It then describes the strategy elaborated to assemble, disseminate and implement terminologies. It summarizes the terminological research methodology adapted to this strategy. To conclude, the article assesses the efficacy of the Québec approach to terminology and examines the approach's dissemination in other countries.

Between ideas and concepts : towards ontology. What is at stake in this paper is the evolution of the main terms used in terminology science as object, designation, idea, notion and concept. The problem is examined through the standards of ISO dealing with terminology work. Some incursions are made into history of logic and philosophy. Finally, the field of ontologies is seen as a new frontier for terminology science, mainly because terminology and ontology have both a logical approach.