The development of French marketing terms: processes of term formation and semantic change (1960-2008)

This contribution presents selected results of a larger study whose main interest is to
find out how French marketing terminology has developed from the beginning of the discipline
in France in the 1960s until 2008. The diachronic study is based on a text corpus, which consists
of ten samples, each representing a period of four or five years, of the specialist journal Revue
Française du Marketing (RFM). An exemplary analysis reveals how the progress in marketing manifests
itself linguistically in the creation and borrowing of terms. With the aid of corpus linguistic
measures and instruments (WordSmith Tools 5.0), we investigate how basic terms like the term
marketing itself or the concept of communication are adopted and come into fashion. A further
look at the use of these and other terms leads to some interesting results concerning processes
of term formation and semantic change.
Keywords terminology, corpus linguistics, term formation, lexical semantics, semantic change,
marketing, French
1 Introduction