SEMANTIC PHENOMENA IN THE TERMINOLOGY OF PRE-UNIVERSITY EDUCATION TEXTBOOKS

Abstract

This paper examines the semantic phenomena that appear in the terminology of pre-university education (PUE) textbooks in Albanian, viewing them at the meeting point between the general lexicon and specialised knowledge. As a system of signs corresponding to the concepts of a field, terminology ideally aims at univocity, precision and a one-to-one link between concept and designation; yet in the real use of school texts these features are confronted with semantic phenomena inherited from everyday language, such as polysemy, synonymy, homonymy and antonymy. The theoretical framing moves from the classical idealisation of the term, which requires a one-to-one concept–designation bond (Wüster, 1979; Cabré, 1999), towards the contemporary view that treats the term as a multidimensional unit embedded in language and communication (Cabré, 2023; Faber & L'Homme, 2022). Drawing on the Communicative Theory of Terminology, the study first addresses the semantic motivation and demotivation of the term, and then analyses each phenomenon in turn. The material follows a corpus of naming units drawn from textbooks of different disciplines — linguistics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography and natural science — processed through a descriptive-analytical, corpus-based method combining semasiological and onomasiological perspectives. The results show that terminological polysemy preserves a sharper conceptual boundary than the general lexicon and functions as a controllable semantic micro-system; that synonymy remains the most unfavourable phenomenon for the didactic text, fed mainly by the parallel circulation of the Albanianised term and the borrowed one; that terminological homonymy is rare and its boundary with polysemy is indeterminate, which agrees with recent findings presenting polysemy as a continuum between sense identity and homonymy-like unrelatedness (Haber & Poesio, 2024); and that antonymy, unlike the other three, is an acceptable and even useful phenomenon, since the juxtaposition of opposites serves as a conceptual differentiator. From the standpoint of the linguistic quality of the school text, the uncontrolled presence of synonymy and homonymy is assessed as an obstacle to the accurate fixing of concepts by pupils. The paper argues that the didactic-scientific register requires standardised, univocal terminology, and that terminological planning of textbooks should be seen as a joint linguistic and pedagogical task.