CONTEXTUAL VARIATION OF TERMS AND ITS INTERPRETATION

This article examines how specialized terms shift in meaning when used in different situational, thematic, and cultural contexts and proposes methodologies for interpreting these variations in terminological work. Building on classical terminology theories (Felber, 1984; Cabré, 1999) and the ISO 704:2009 standard, it incorporates the sociocognitive framework (Temmerman, 2000) and recent corpus-based contextonym analysis (San Martín, 2025). It introduces the notion of semantic potential and its reduction into “premeaning,” surveys methods for extracting and analyzing contextual variants, and offers a typology – modulation, perspectivization, and subconceptualization – to categorize term shifts. Practical guidelines for crafting context-sensitive definitions conclude the study.