Tavallisten kielenkäyttäjien käsityksiä termeistä

Authors

• Päivi Pasanen Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.70484/vakki.149178

Keywords:

erikoiskieli, termi, yleiskieli

Abstract

According to the international standard ISO 704, terms represent general concepts in a special language in a specific subject field (ISO 704:2009(E): 34). Correspondingly, general language is not supposed to contain terms (see e.g. TTP s. v. yleiskieli) and, consequently, they are not expected to appear in general texts. However, sometimes the need arises to use special language to communicate particular concepts to the public. Therefore, based on my experience, I argue that terms are indeed used in everyday communication, for example in mass media. In this paper, I discuss terms in general language communication. The study addresses the question of what type of concepts requiring special language are communicated in mass media. The textual corpus used for the study consists of news and comments on it published in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in 2011–2012. The corpus is available in the Language Bank of Finland and can be searched with the concordance search tool Korp. The results of the study show that a large number of items which were designated as terms by the readers were not terms in any specific field. This implies that a reader’s opinion of a term differs from that of a terminologist.