Multi-word term reduction in specialized languages La réduction de termes complexes dans les langues de spécialité

Our study applies statistical methods to French and Italian corpora to examine the phenomenon of multi-word term reduction in specialty languages. There are two kinds of reduction: anaphoric and lexical. We show that anaphoric reduction depends on the discourse type (vulgarization, pedagogical, specialized) but is independent of both domain and language; that lexical reduction depends on domain and is more frequent in technical, rapidly evolving domains; and that anaphoric reductions tend to follow full terms rather than precede them. We define the notion of the anaphoric tree of the term and study its properties. Concerning lexical reduction, we attempt to prove statistically that there is a notion of term lifecycle, where the full form is progressively replaced by a lexical reduction.