The Case of Plant Names with Animal Associations: Frames in Specialised Domains
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | A number of names in biological binomial nomenclature contain words that arouse associations with names of other taxons. Among them are names of botanical taxons, i.e. plants, in which either the generic noun or the specific epithet denote animals. The notion of animals in such terms is usually not meant literally but is metaphorically expanded and various aspects of meaning associated with animals are denoted instead. Binomial nomenclatures show significant interlinguistic differences even though the named real-world concepts are identical. The chapter employs the approaches of Sociocognitive Terminology (Temmerman 2000) and Frame-based Terminology (Faber and López Rodriguez 2012) to analyze the development of botanical terms including words denoting animals. As it is assumed that terminology within specialized domains is organized in specific conceptual frames and reflects the conceptualization characteristic of those domains, it looks into the historical, pragmatic and semantic aspects of the selected naming domains in English, Latin and Czech. Particularly the difference between more descriptive and natural English names of taxons and their rather artificial and semantically implicit Latin equivalents illuminates the relative weight of the individual categories and aspects of the terminological process. The chapter aims to show that different cognitive frames concerning identical concepts in various languages do not hamper understanding, once they are properly interpreted. |