Terminology in Media Discourse: A Case Study of Terms Denoting Phobia Types in English, Lithuanian and Norwegian News Media Sites

Abstract

The paper presents the trilingual (English – Lithuanian – Norwegian) analysis of the terms denoting phobia types in mass media discourse. The aim of the paper is threefold: to perform conceptual categorisation of the terms, establish the term formation patterns in the investigated languages, as well as to determine which phobia types were most often discussed in the selected news media sites (“The Guardian”, “DELFI” and “Dagbladet”) over a 10-year period. For the purposes of the research, a trilingual comparable corpus was compiled, from which 268 terms were manually extracted, matched and investigated. The findings of the research provide important information on conceptual, linguistic and social aspects of the phobia terms which may contribute to terminology research in the psychiatry domain.