Communication of surrogacy in the ECtHR judgments and their overviews by bloggers: issues of near-synonymy and popularisation

This corpus-based study investigates how scientific concepts related to surrogacy are communicated in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and in the blogs overviewing the same cases. The study follows a quantiqualitative approach. The methodology of Corpus Linguistics is used against the theoretical background of socio-cognitive semantics and synonymy. A discourse analytical perspective is used to look at the representation of surrogacy-related scientific concepts through the choice of a particular word among a set of synonyms to designate the concept. The study attempts at assessing terminological variation during the dissemination process from judgments to blogs, involving entextualisation of scientific concepts into the legal context and the following popularisation process by bloggers, which often involves also ideological messages. The results provide confirmatory evidence of a) terminological rigour in judgments b) terminological dispersion and use of synonyms in blog posts, characterised by selection of newsworthy elements, lexical simplification, cognitive and often ideological reconceptualisation of knowledge units.