TERM IN NON-SPECIALISED CONTEXT. CASE OF DETERMINOLOGISATION OF PSYCHIATRIC TERMINOLOGY
TERM IN NON-SPECIALISED CONTEXT. CASE OF DETERMINOLOGISATION OF PSYCHIATRIC TERMINOLOGY

Summary/Abstract: The concept of “term” as a strictly monosemic, isolated unit incompatible with synonymy and polysemy is not based on reality. Term variation can be of diatopic, diachronic, or diastratic nature. In addition, there is a close relationship between specialised vocabulary and general vocabulary, as term can migrate from specialised language towards general language (and vice versa). The phenomenon is called determinologisation (other authors call it despecialisation, vulgarisation, dedomanialisation, banalisation, or lexical trivialisation). The article deals with determinologisation of psychiatric terminology. The number of terms penetrating nonspecialised language is growing, but determinologisation remains a phenomenon that only concerns certain categories of terms and, in particular, certain topics (such as environment, medicine, information technology, and space industry). The objective of the paper is to analyse the specificities of use of psychiatric terms in non-specialised texts, particularly in journalistic texts, by investigating the question of degree of specialisation of term for its use in determinologised context. To identify the basic psychiatric terms submitted for analysis, authors used the 5th chapter of the International Classification of Diseases, containing mental and behavioural disorders. The phenomenon of determinologisation has been analysed in LeMonde.fr, online version of the French daily newspaper, using Sketch Engine software tool. The authors identified a number of terms commonly used in non-specialised context (newspaper articles of various sections – news, culture, economics, sports). Usually (with certain exceptions), these were one-word terms, all of them being nouns and adjectives.

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