On the origins of socioterminology: socio-cultural contexts of a term's functioning

This article considers one of the modern branches of terminology studies - socioterminology. The status of socioterminology as an independent scholarly trend is discussed. The article describes the heuristic potential of socioterminology, which makes it possible to consider terminological variation as a result of the sociocognitive differentiation of discourse and, consequently, as an inherent property of all terminology. An integrative metamodel of terminological variation is proposed, with whose help the life cycle of a term may be reconstructed as a necessary condition for the development, transfer and management of knowledge.