Terminology of Astronomy: a study on neology and variation

Author(s)

Ana Maria Ribeiro de Jesus

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2011-03-16

Examining board members

Ieda Maria Alves; Maria Aparecida Barbosa; Lidia Almeida Barros; Jacques Raymond Daniel Lepine

• Advisor: Ieda Maria Alves

Abstract

The present study, within the context of Terminology, aims at investigating two linguistic phenomena in the field of Astronomy: neology and terminological variation. Therefore, the corpus is composed of texts of different degrees of specialization: General Astronomy books, popular science magazines, theses and dissertations recently defended in this area. Neological unity is treated under a social focus, assuming the dynamics which is inherent to specialized languages, especially to the scientific areas that are closely related to technological advances, such as Astronomy. At the same time, it was observed that the terminological variation is remarkable at every level of the corpus, and that even the neological terms often come up along with variants. In order to determine the neological character of terms, the analysis was based on criteria traditionally followed in neological research, such as the corpus of exclusion, and other proposed criteria, such as metalinguistic elements. Tangentially, a trilingual conceptual structure was organized, based on the general Astronomy corpus, establishing equivalences, in Portuguese, French and English, among about 500 terms in eight subdomains of the domain. Thus, English foreign words, especially calques, were shown to be predominant with regard to neologisms in this field; in turn, syntactic variation is the most productive form of variants. Finally, based on the specifications of the language of the domain, we propose, then, a typological classification for each of these phenomena in the terminology of Astronomy. (AU)