Cognitive Approaches to Specialist Languages

The Success of Low-Salience Terms

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another pair, thermal noise is described as “more transparent than and,
therefore, preferred over Johnson noise”. Two points need to be
highlighted with regard to this evidence from ISO 704 that are pertinent to
the following analysis: 1. transparency is the first recommendation
regarding term formation named in the standard, and 2. 3 of the 4
examples of non-transparent terms given in the standard are eponymic
terms.
On the basis of the definition of term transparency, two meanings of
terms can be distinguished:

 conceptual meaning (CM) of terms, which refers to the concept

associated with a term via its definition^1

 lexical meaning (LM) of terms, which is the combination of

meanings of semantically significant elements in a term.

Transparency can thus be defined as the convergence of LM and CM
and one may say that transparent terms convey concept-salient
information. An example of a transparent term is viral pharyngitis, whose
significant components point to the site of disease (pharyng-, meaning
pharynx, or throat), type of medical problem (-itis, meaning inflammation)
and its cause (viral, a relational adjective). Most transparent terms are
analytical terms (Musioáek-ChoiĔska 1986), i.e. such that contain only
non-metaphorical elements that are meaningful and are usually also found
in other terms in the domain.
Summing up, high-salience terms are analytical terms, including many
neoclassical composites (pharyngitis), while low-salience terms include
terms incorporating alphanumeric symbols, eponymic terms and
abbreviations (if they take over from full terms as the main carriers of
conceptual content). Definitions of low-salience terms need to be
memorised because they cannot be retrieved from term structure.

(^1) Conceptual change and definitional stability are discussed in the “Conclusions”
section.