Quand le nom propre devient une particule élémentaire de la matière : étude contrastive des éponymes Higgs boson et boson de Higgs et de leurs substituts dans des textes spécialisés et vulgarisés

Abstract

While eponyms are frequently used within both terminologies and lexis of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) (Garfield [1983]) in English and in French, the attribution of proper names to scientific concepts or objects may sometimes be problematic. One of those issues is the discrepancy between the authorship and the naming of the discovery, which can be observed with the term Higgs boson (or boson de Higgs in French), which refers to an elementary particle that was discovered in 1964 by not one but three physicists (Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs).This corpus-based study seeks to analyze the use of the eponyms Higgs boson in English and boson de Higgs in French as well as the use of the terms substituting them, either the term BEH boson (made up of the other physicists’ names) or the non-eponymic term scalar boson. The study is carried out in both “specialized texts” and “popularized texts” (Pic & Furmaniak [2010]). By analyzing these two “degrees of specialization” (Pic & Furmaniak [2010]), we can observe the use of specialized terms by the lay readership, who more often tends to use specialized terms from specialized fields when the readership is in close contact with these fields (Van der Yeught [2016]) (such as the experimental discovery of the boson in 2012). In other words, this paper, which first analyzes well-established medical eponymy since eponyms in physics are not often discussed, describes how the non-consensual Higgs terms are used, despite the incomplete name and the controversial discussions it provokes.

Keywords

• English
• French
• corpus
• terminology
• contrastive linguistics
• eponym