Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

47(intertextual). Cop (1991: 2776) uses the term prototypical because she wishes toemphasize the fact that full semantic identity of lexical items is rare and, as a result,what an equivalent must cover is the prototypical sense of a headword and notnecessarily its less central senses. Finally, Piotrowski uses the term cognitive so as toplace emphasis on ―all relevant dimensions of meaning‖ (1994: 139). He also explainsthat this kind of equivalence is one of the means of restricting the number of equivalentsin a bilingual dictionary given the fact that lexicographers sometimes have to cope withthe infinitude of equivalents. A simple example of cognitive equivalence is that of tigerand tigre provided in Atkins and Rundell (2008: 469) that denote the same object andform an exact match of semantic content.Most terminologists do not use the terms cognitive equivalence or semanticequivalence, but this kind of equivalence is the one that corresponds the most toterminological equivalence, as we will demonstrate later on. However, terminologistswho adopt a lexico-semantic approach instead of a conceptual one will refer toequivalence as an interlingual semantic relation or as a relation between terms with thesame meaning (as opposed to a relation between terms denoting the same concept). Forinstance, L‘Homme (2004: 115) writes that ―des termes sont équivalents lorsqu‘ils ontles mêmes composantes sémantiques‖, and for van Campenhoudt (2001) equivalentterms are those terms who share the same ―sememes‖ or the same ―semantic charge‖.Explanatory equivalenceExplanatory equivalence or descriptive equivalence are terms used by Zgusta (1971:319) and Svensén (2009: 255) to refer to free phrases that provide information about thelexical unit of the target language. Svensén (2009: 257) cautions that ―explanatoryequivalents should be distinguished from those (mainly encyclopaedic) explanationsthat are used when there is no target-language expression at all‖, because as Zgusta said―if stabilized and accepted into the language, it can become a lexical unit of the target