Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2012

This paper describes conceptual dynamicity as reflected in the verbs in specialized texts. All the examples used to illustrate this phenomenon are taken from a corpus of meteorological texts, and are typical of processes and actions within the TROPICAL CYCLONE frame. In this study, we analyze verb meaning as well as argument structure. Our results show that the basic meaning of each verb profiles the meaning of the term tropical cyclone in different ways, and provides a way to access the multidimensionality of terms and the concepts they designate. We also classify the verbs most frequently activated by TROPICAL CYCLONE in lexical domains since verbs with similar meaning also have similar argument structure. This method of studying terms in conjunction with the verbs that most frequently activate them is crucial for the representation of conceptual information, and is connected with the network of semantic relations that is activated by a specialized concept.

The present study investigates the frequency of use of neologisms (new terms) coined by the Academy of Persian (Farsi) Language and Literature (APLL) for foreign technical words, compared to borrowings from foreign languages in the translations of scientific and technical documents. It also seeks to find a relationship between familiarity with APLL-coined terms and their frequency of occurrence in translations of such literature. To achieve these goals, fifty-five PhD students of nine disciplines in humanities, medicine, technology, engineering and basic sciences were randomly selected. Then, nine technical texts, each including twenty technical terms followed by a twenty multiple-choice item test, along with a familiarity questionnaire based on the same twenty terms were given to the participants of each discipline with the aim to elicit the data required. Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and Spearman's Correlation Coefficient were applied to analyze the data. The results indicated a significant difference between the frequency of APLL-coined terms and that of borrowings (Z = −5.140, Sig = .000). In addition, a positive correlation was obtained between familiarity with APLL-coined terms and their frequency in the translation of technical texts (r = .593, p.05). In fact, as the familiarity with APLL-coined terms increased, so did their frequency. These findings are suggestive enough for APLL and similar organizations as well as for language planners to increase the frequency of use of their coined terms either by enhancing their familiarity rate (i.e. the ease with which coined terms are recognized) by users or by naturalizing neologisms (i.e. enhancing their familiarity rate) in any way possible, thereby encouraging users to employ them further in their writings and translations.

This article explores a statistical, language-independent methodology for the construction of taxonomies of specialized domains from noisy corpora. In contrast to proposals that exploit linguistic information by searching for lexico-syntactic patterns that tend to express the hypernymy relation, our methodology relies entirely upon the distributional semantics of terms as captured by their lexical co-occurrence in large scale corpora. In a first stage, we analyze the syntagmatic relations of terms that serve as seeds of the taxonomy to be constructed and we obtain, thus, the first batch of hypernym candidate terms for our seed terms. In a second stage, we analyze the paradigmatic relations of the terms by inspecting which terms show a prominent frequency of co-occurrence with the terms that, as we found in the previous stage, are syntagmatically related to our seed terms — which allows us to refine the first batch of hypernym candidate terms and obtain new ones. In a third and final stage, we build a taxonomy from the obtained hypernym candidate lists, exploiting the asymmetric statistic association between terms that is characteristic of the hypernymy relation.

This paper evaluates the possibilities of recognizing term candidates through their formal and semantic characteristics. From a cognitive-linguistic stance, the semantic motivation of the word-formation patterns of collocations and compounds in domain-specific texts is assumed to promote their termhood. The semantic motivation to integrate into a multi-word unit is assumed to originate in the generally agreed on generic reference of the modifying constituent. This hypothesis is investigated empirically in a corpus-linguistic experiment. Term candidates instantiating different derivational patterns of adjective–noun constructions have been manually sorted by experts into approved and non-approved terms. Our subsequent linguistic categorization into the morpho-semantic constructions instantiated by the term candidates could be verified quantitatively in terms of relative frequencies. These frequencies clearly divide the term candidates into instances of term-promoting and term-impeding constructions. Obviously, the experts have approved the terms of those constructions which come up with a high relative frequency in the corpus.

Most scholars — and in this regard there is no big difference between specialised lexicographers or terminographers — do not subscribe to the thesis elaborated in this paper, namely that a dictionary is a tool, and that a good tool is a tool conceived for a specific function that satisfies the needs of a particular user group in a specific user situation. In the light of this thesis, it is not important to discuss whether it is better for a dictionary to have, for example, an alphabetic or a systematic macrostructure. The real question is: How can one tailor a tool to the specific information needs of a given user group in such a way that these users can gain quick access to the data they need? Like with any other tool, the best solution is a monofunctional tool. In the case of lexicography, that would be a monofunctional dictionary. Such a dictionary differs from most general and specialised language dictionaries, which are normally constructed as polyfunctional tools which attempt to help solve a range of cognitive and communicative problems. Taking one database as the point of departure, I will discuss the concept of this database and of 23 different Danish, English and Spanish accounting dictionaries.