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Рицар)) and in Kharkiv (headed by M. Hinzburh (Михайло
Давидович Гінзбург)).
1. 4 The Definition of Terminology
Terminology as a discipline of study is a relative newcomer.
As a subject field with explicit premises, terminology emerges
from the need of technicians and scientists to unify the concepts
and terms of their subject fields in order to facilitate professional
communication and the transfer of knowledge. Precisely for this
reason, terminology has been for some time a discipline in search
of a theory with premises capable of accounting for specialized
knowledge representation, category organization and description,
as well as the semantic and syntactic behavior of terminological
units in one or various languages. Over the years this quest for a
set of theoretical principles has led terminologists to ask
themselves whether terminology should be regarded as a branch of
philosophy, sociology, cognitive Science, or linguistics.
Not all experts agree that terminology constitutes a separate
scientific discipline, nor do they all consider it a theoretical
subject. For some, terminology is a practice dealing with social
needs that are related to political and/or commercial ends (Juan
Sager, Robert Dubuc, Bruno Besse, Blaise Nkwenti-Azeh). Juan
Sager said (1990): “There is no substantial body of literature
which could support the proclamation of terminology as a separate
discipline and there is not likely to be. Everything of import that
can be said about terminology is more appropriately said in the
context of linguistics or information science or computational
linguistics. We see terminology as a number of practices that have
evolved around the creation of terms, their collection and
explication and finally their presentation in various printed and
electronic media. Practices however well-established, do not
constitute a discipline, but there is no denying a long history of
methodologies which themselves require theoretical underpinnings
to justify their distinctive nature. Disciplines establish knowledge
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