The Success of Low-Salience Terms
453the increasingly rich conceptual content than would be possible with any
intrinsically inadequate full “activity term”.
Gradable non-terminological adjectives as term
components
Let us now examine a group of gradable (non-relational) and primarily
non-terminological adjectives that sometimes appear as term components.
This group includes such adjectives as high and low (as in high- and low-
density lipoprotein, carriers for cholesterol molecules) as well as early.
Because such adjectives primarily belong with general language, their
meaning as term components varies between terms: early-onset diabetes
mellitus occurs in young children, but early-onset coronary heart disease
has been defined as that occurring before the age of 55 years. They might
be called “situationally determined” if we assume, metaphorically, that
their use with different headwords resembles the vagueness of deictic
expressions, which, nonetheless, become precise in particular language use
situations.
Such gradable adjectives are normally used to introduce a binary
opposition (between early and non-early or, sometimes, early and late)
that, however, holds only until new concepts sharing the same
superordinate concept are discovered. A case in point, injurious immune
response was originally studied as allergic reactions and divided into
immediate and delayed. Later on, two more types with intermediate time
frames were identified. The current categorisation, known as the Gell &
Coombs classification, distinguishes four types of immune response,
referred to as type I (immediate, allergic), type II, type III and type IV
(delayed), the first one being further divided into early and late! We can
see here the familiar process of resorting to alphanumeric symbols in the
presence of a growing discrepancy between the lexical and conceptual
meaning of terms, but let us also note that the discrepancy was partly owed
to the use of a term component with situationally determined meaning.
Non-transparent analytical terms?
Transparency may be low even in certain cases of terms from within
categories usually regarded as highly salient. While the lexical meaning of
neoclassical compounds is often a good reflection of their conceptual
content, there do exist multiword neoclassical terms that are understood
only on the strength of their definitions. Diabetes mellitus is a case in
point: the term is a carry-over from Roman medicine and literally means