Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2015

This paper deals with the following topics: (a) theoretical aspects of terminology with special emphasis on English-Serbian language contacts, (b) contrastive semantic and morphosyntactic analysis of the corpus containing English and Serbian terms of the five most popular ball games in the region, which were excerpted from official texts, (c) standardization of sports terms in Serbian including six principles listed in decreasing order of priority: bi-univocity, transparency, systematicity, productivity, concision, and frequency, and (d) lexicographic codification of sports terms. The current research is based on a previous study (Milić 2004) dealing with sports terminology, the main result of which was the proposal of a model of terminological standardization and publication of an English-Serbian dictionary of sports terms entitled Englesko-srpski rečnik sportskih termina (Milić 2006).

This paper addresses the troublesome question of feature selection and content prediction in definition writing. I present the basis of definition-authoring tools that can be used across a range of contexts, independently of the domain and language of the definitions. In addition to being domain- and language-independent, these tools should be easily tailorable to specific domains. Thus, my work seeks to contribute to developing generic definition-writing aids that can be tailored to a range of different contexts and domains. The objectives of this article are: (1) to show that it is possible to create implementable generic definition models; (2) to show how to constrain these models to produce definitions relevant to particular contexts; and (3) to propose an ontological analysis framework with a fixed and well-motivated descriptive vocabulary that can be used in further content analysis studies in terminology and to enhance integration of textual definitions in ontologies.

Although fashion is a topic of chief relevance in our society, its linguistic characteristics have attracted little attention among researchers. Facing the challenge of combining two different, but arguably complementary, perspectives — the Frame-Based Terminology model and Relevance Theory —, this paper focuses on English and French neologisms in the language of fashion. The data, extracted from top quality Spanish women’s fashion magazines, have been examined as signals of specialised language. The analysis shows that the correct interpretation of the terms rests on a specific set of relations and roles, but also on their lexical expansion, which satisfies the expectations of expert readers and general public.

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.

Terminologists’ interest in studying the role of metaphor and metaphorical terms in specialized communication has proliferated since the first papers addressing this issue appeared in the 1990s. However, we believe that some facets of terminological meaning still remain overlooked or merit further analysis. This paper attempts to contribute to the study of one of these facets: the figurative meaning of some compound terms used in the domain of luxury marketing and business. In order to present a systematized view of this phenomenon we will adopt some theoretical tools from the Conventional Figurative Language Theory, in order to confirm the validity of some of its postulates for compound term analysis. Next, a contrastive approach between English, Spanish and Russian compound terms will put the theoretical ideas into practice with the aim of illustrating their applied and metalinguistic potential. Some basic conclusions will be offered at the end of the paper.