Are specialised acronyms and abreviations the same as other terms? A study in short diachrony in the medical field

The article is based on the analysis of a diachronic corpus covering eighteen years in the field of pandemic respiratory infections. It aims to describe the evolution of the use of specialised acronyms and abbrevations in French and in the writings of experts. The analysis of the corpus shows great variability in the use of these terminological units and also gives valuable information on the different types of terminological variation that occur over the years.