Speakers
Janet DeCesaris
Mercè Lorente Casafont
Description
Although the ‘Circular Economy’ has been widely discussed in the media for years, general dictionaries still do not provide the relevant definitions and/or collocations. We show by examining dictionary definitions that many salient words used in this field have undergone varying degrees of semantic broadening in the 252general language. Current terminological needs often dictate more precise meanings than those used in the general language, in essence leading to semantic narrowing. We discuss these two seemingly opposing forces in relation to a small set of words from the ‘Circular Economy’ and show how this sort of semantic development is easily accounted for within the Communicative Theory of Terminology.
