Vocabulário terminológico de conceitos de língua

Abstract

Concepts such as “first language”, “non-native language”, “second language”, “heritage language”, “host language”, among many others, are widely used in the fields of Language Policy and Language Teaching to describe, classify, specify, and represent the roles played by languages and the statuses, values, and functions attributed to them in diverse sociolinguistic configurations. These language concepts are functional and dynamic markers, continuously reformulated, redefined, and updated in response to research demands, as well as for being linked to sociolinguistic and identity realities that are inherently mutable. Given the centrality of the terminology of language concepts to fields operating at the intersection of languages, individuals, and society, it is crucial for researchers and language teachers to master this terminological-conceptual network, since, beyond scientific communication, this network is central to discussions on language policy and language teaching and learning. However, the lack of consensus and the terminological diversity of language concepts, combined with their dynamicity and plasticity, result in terminological instabilities, overlaps, and ambiguities that hinder the understanding, terminological precision, and mastery of this terminological-conceptual network by language teachers and researchers. Therefore, the aim of this research was to create the VTCL – Terminological Vocabulary of Language Concepts (http://vtcl.votec.ileel.ufu.br/), a freely available online reference work that systematically and concisely presents the terminology of language concepts, encompassing the polysemy of this terminological network and the conceptual relationships among the terminological units in the vocabulary. The production of the VTCL was guided by the theoretical framework of the Communicative Theory of Terminology, the theoretical-methodological principles of Terminography, and Corpus Linguistics as the methodological foundation. It was developed from an academic corpus of approximately 23.3 million tokens, consisting of 325 papers, 521 theses, and 117 dissertations in the field of Portuguese for Speakers of Other Languages. The corpus was processed and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively using the software WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2022), while a new version of VoTec (Fromm, 2007) was developed specifically to produce and host the vocabulary online. The VTCL initially includes the 10 most frequent terminological units in the study corpus, namely: additional language, heritage language, sign language, foreign language, native language, non-native language, official language, first language, and second language (língua segunda and segunda língua). Due to the high polysemy within this terminological-conceptual network, the analysis of these 10 terminological units led to the creation of 28 entries for the VTCL. As future directions of this research, we aim to progressively expand our terminological vocabulary to include the 50 terminological units identified in the study corpus.