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cognitive component, a linguistic component, and a
sociocommunicative component. In this respect, they behave like
general language words. Their specificity resides in a series of
cognitive, syntactic, and pragmatic constraints, which affirm their
membership in a specialized domain.

Sociocognitive terminology (Rita Temmerman)
concentrates on the cognitive potential of terminology in domain-
specific language and on terminological variation as related to
verbal, situational and cognitive contexts in discourse and in a
wide range of communicative environments. What makes
sociocognitive terminology different from other theories is its
emphasis on conceptual organization, and its focus on category
structure from the perspective of cognitive linguistics approaches.
While prescriptive terminology concept systems are organized in
terms of conceptual relations, sociocognitive categories are said to
have prototype structure, and conceptual representations initially
take the form of cognitive models. Another significant difference
is that sociocognitive terminology is perhaps the first approach to
truly take on board the historical or diachronic dimension of terms.
So even now when there are so many researches on terms it
is difficult to invent a good definition of the term.

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