Les recommandations officielles des Commissions de Terminologie et leur rapport à la langue commune : indices pour un profil lexicologique du français

The present article analyses official recommendations made by the Commissions de terminologie. Terms coined to replace anglicisms are in a majority of cases motivated, i.e. semantically and morphologically transparent words. We take advantage of this almost systematic characteristic to propose a metholodology which accounts for the lexical motivation of the corpus. In a cognitive comparative approach we examine the terms adopted in 2005, and ascertain how they have been taken up in general language usage five years later. By comparing the results thus obtained with those of two earlier studies, it is possible to bring out specificities of specialized vocabulary, and at the same time show up morphological and cognitive preferences which seem to characterize the lexicon of French.