Terminology and the theory of scale-free networks

Methodological Considerations in Constructing a Theoretical Framework of Terminological Awareness in Healthcare Communication

“…Fóris (2013) suggests that the three dimensions of terminological units defined by Cabré (2003) are three scale-free networks (cf. Barabási, 2012), and joining them results in the modelling of the process of communication, which she calls the "model of terminological network" (Fóris, 2012(Fóris, , 2013. She claims that in the case of a terminological network, the unity of the three dimensions or sub-networks (i.e., cognitive, linguistic and communicativepragmatic) "determines the communicative value of a term" (Fóris, 2013, p. 428).…”

“…Let us explore these networks of the terminological model in relation to healthcare communication from the point of view of the three-layered structure of terminological units (Cabré, 2003;Faber, 2012;Fóris, 2009Fóris, , 2010Fóris, , 2012Fóris, , 2013, forming the skeleton of healthcare communication (Figure 1). In what follows, each network -cognitive, linguistic and communicative-pragmatic -will be closely observed with the assumption that these three networks are, in fact, sub-networks in the system of healthcare communication, in continuous interaction with each other, each serving as an informational variable for the other two, shaping the state of the others, and consequently the state of the whole system.…”

Network Theory and Terminology

“…Before networks were widely researched, there were a great number of linguistic findings on natural languages that now lend themselves to new interpretation through network theory. Now that network theory has been widely interpreted and mathematically described, previous linguistic findings can be inserted into the system of networks (for details, see Fóris 2012).…”

“…In Fóris (2012), I presented calculations on the numeric data obtained from previous publications on quantitative linguistic research. Zipf examined the frequency of occurrence of words in standard English and found that the product of the v rank of a word in the order of frequency, and the f value of its frequency in the corpus, is constant (C) (Zipf 1945 and1949) Zipf 's law was thought to be a universal linguistic law.…”

“…According to this model, the three components of the terminological approach-the cognitive, the linguistic and the communicative-form scale-free networks on their own, and the process of communication can be modelled by joining them. This is the model of terminological network (Fóris 2012).…”