Adjectives as terms

Abstract

This paper discusses terminology in the field of plant morphology, where nearly half of the terms are adjectives. What are adjectives as terms like? How are they differentiated from adjectives in the general language? How should adjectives be treated in terminological description and terminography? For example, the relationship between an adjective and the object it characterizes differs from the relationship between a noun and the object to which it refers. For a systematic definition, adjectives have often been changed to nouns in terminological dictionaries: property names derived from adjectives or modifiers of noun phrases. This article argues that such a method is not applicable in plant morphology because, on the one hand, that kind of nouns does not occur in the texts that describe plants and, on the other hand, because of the semantic changes it may cause. The article also proposes some new tools for the description and definition of adjectival terms.