CHAPTER TWENTY
THE SUCCESS OF LOW-SALIENCE TERMS
MARIUSZ GÓRNICZ
Introduction
Low-salience terms are those whose lexically meaningful constituents
shed little light on the salient features of the underlying concept. Two
common types of such terms are terms including a proper name (mostly
eponymic terms) and terms that include an alphanumeric symbol, i.e. a letter
or a number (vitamin A). Such terms have rarely been investigated by
scholars endeavouring to propose general theories of terminology. Eponyms
are not listed in the index in Cabre (1998). The volume by Faber (2012)
mentions eponymic terms only once, as an example of the metonymic
process in terminology (Tercedor 2012). At the same time, eponyms have
been hotly debated by medical scientists (see, for example, Dirckx 2001;
Duque-Parra et al. 2006; Matteson, Woywodt 2006; Whitworth 2007;
Woywodt, Matteson, 2007; Jana et al. 2009), who often point out their
inability to provide any information on the nature of the concept they
represent and equally often take their stand on the issue of whether the
surname in an eponymic term should be used in the Saxon genitive form
or as a substantive adjunct. While the low informativeness of eponymic
terms has often been pointed out as an argument for banning them from
terminologies, curiously, the authors do not comment in the same vein on
other types of low-informative terms such as terms containing
alphanumeric symbols. This attitudinal difference is an interesting point of
research, but even more interesting is to gain an insight into the reasons
behind the use of terms that name but hardly express their underlying
concepts.
Low-salience terms represent one end of the range of terminological
transparency. At the opposite end are found so-called analytical terms
(Musioáek-ChoiĔski 1984), whose constituents refer to features of the
underlying concept present in its Aristotelian definition. Analytical terms