The Success of Low-Salience Terms
455the headword in the several compounds that exist today). Still, the
existence of low-salience terms underscores the importance of concept
stability as the users of such terms cannot rely on lexical clues to help
them access the underlying concepts. Sager hints at this crucial role played
by concepts and definitions when he notes that term users do not
decompose the morphemic structures of terms to extract meaning and thus
aid comprehension, adding that “the case of abbreviations, acronyms and
other forms of shortening clearly confirms this paradox” (Sager 1990: 63),
inadvertently suggesting that more research effort should perhaps be
geared towards investigating how little is needed for a term to be effective.
The main conclusions of this chapter are as follows:
a compositional lexical form can be sacrificed when it no longer
matches the concept;
eponymic terms representing complex concepts survive because
their non-head components are easy to remember and pronounce.
The eponymic component has only a differentiating function by
virtue of its phonemic composition. Eponyms may be “precise”
because their users are compelled to memorise the definition;
terms with alphanumeric symbols constitute an advanced stage in
our understanding of the fragments of reality in question and in the
evolution of the associated conceptual microfields.References
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