Abstract: Terminology in Political Discourse: The Impact of Its Cognitive-Social Dimension. The aim of the present article is to compare the terminology used in oral political discourse and that produced on Twitter in the context of COVID-19 in Spain, in order to observe its possible cognitive, conceptual and semantic implications, derived from the terminological integration into political discourse and subsequent digitisation. The study departs from the question of how textual typology affects terminology, given the differences between the participants engaged in the communicative situation, as well as possible cultural and ideological elements that may affect the terminological value of the lexical unit. In order to determine the influence of the communicative context, the textual typology and the ideological and emotional load of the texts on the cognitive dimension of the terms, the two types of political discourse have been classified according to their defining social features, on the one hand, and the terminology present in them according to their degree of cognitive demand, depending on their formal representation and contextual elements that may condition conceptualisation, on the other. The study has shown how the sociolinguistic function of texts has a significant impact on the specialised language used in them, due to the communicative context and certain ideological narratives and cultural elements that are integrated into it, and has highlighted the possible cognitive implications of using terminology outside its sphere of specialisation, which could act to the detriment of the specialised knowledge it designates and conveys.

Keywords: political discourse, terminology, socioterminology, social media, COVID-19