Synonymy of medical terms: limitation or necessity?

Abstract

Although synonymy is considered to be the fundamental semantic relation, paradoxically it has not yet been fully examined. Its presence in the LSP has been disputed for a long time because it was believed to be incompatible with the concept of accuracy in scientific communication. Later studies have shown that terms and words are formally and semantically identical and that they only differ at the pragmatic level due to the fact that terms designate concepts used in specific contexts. Terms thus prove their polysemic and synonymic capacity. The first part of this paper offers a review of different definitions and typologies of synonyms in the context of lexical semantics and The Communicative Theory of Terminology. The second part of this paper presents a research based on the corpus study of 400 medical terms. Its aim is : (a) to describe the causes of terminological synonymy, (b) to determine language mechanisms involved in the formation of synonyms, and (c) to specify their morphological structures. The results obtained confirm the hypothesis that French for Medical Purposes abounds in synonyms of various morphological structures, the presence of which is a result of several linguistic and extralinguistic factors.