Pharmacophore, syndrome de Noé, tire-veine, and other newcomers in medical terminology. Analysis of official medical neologisms in FranceTerme

Abstract

The article deals with formal and semantic neological terms in the field of medicine as a domain with a dynamically developing interdisciplinary terminology. The official French terminological database FranceTerme, available online, has been used as a corpus: namely a closed group of the 175 terms that have been added since 2011 under the heading Health and Medicine. The analysis of formal terminogenic means deals with derivation, composition, abbreviation, syntactic formation, and borrowing, which are commented upon and complemented via relevant examples. The article further deals with semantic neology, manifesting itself as terminologization of words from everyday language and their figurative use. The metaphors detected in the corpus are based both on analogies of form and function, and the most frequently occurring metonymies are based on a cause–effect relationship. The analysis is mainly qualitative, as the variability and multiplicity of terminological means involved in term formation constitute the principal limiting factors for a deeper quantitative analysis.