Brain-imaging techniques can be applied in specialized language research to provide insights into how specialized concepts are represented, and processed in the brain. The fMRI study described in this paper focused on general and specialized lexical units and the perception of semantic meaning by expert geologists and non-geologists. The subjects performed semantic matching tasks and made decisions in regards to general language words and specialized terms designating specialized tools and familiar household utensils. The linguistic processing of specialized terms was found to be modulated by the individual’s previous experience with the objects. These results strengthen the hypothesis that when performing a domain-specific task, experts activate different brain systems from novices. This provides data regarding which brain systems are involved in cognitive processes.

This article discusses various types of bilingual French-Norwegian corpora within the field of law that the author has used in her research. Different corpus designs and applications are described with an emphasis on the specific challenges posed by legal discourse due to the culture bound nature of legal concepts, terms and discursive norms. The article describes both comparable and parallel corpora, both of which provide not only interesting avenues for further research but also valuable insight for the training of legal translators.

This article aims to show the importance of the phenomenon of linguistic interference in French speeches initially presented in the European Parliament between 2000 and 2011, then transcribed and translated into Spanish, that were constituted in a parallel corpus. We will speak of interference when the Spanish translation contains Gallicisms of a lexical, (morpho)syntactical or semantic nature.

Diagnostic labels used in assessment reports in Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) show inconsistent semantic and syntactic variations. In this article we describe the way SLT terminology relates to the patients’ situation and the representations held by the professionals for each pathological condition. A corpus of 436 French reports was used to extract the most frequently used terms (such as “difficulté(s)”), to perform an analysis of the labelling process (e.g.: test usage, diagnosis according to patient age group and pathology) and to describe the most salient semantic and syntactic properties (e.g.: dynamic factor, use of prepositions “de/à”). Two major categories emerged with terms expressing on the one hand a procedural or functional and on the other hand a more systemic conception of the pathology. The aim is to establish new basis for a more accurate taxonomy.