Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2020

Abstract

The status of adjectives as independent terms has been demonstrated in recent studies. However, their treatment in current terminography practice is not entirely satisfactory. This paper addresses the description of adjectives in term banks of French adjectives related to the field of renewable energy. Our goals were to conduct a corpus-driven semantic analysis of a sample of significant adjectives in this domain and to highlight some properties that should be taken into account in terminography. In particular, we used lexical functions developed within the framework of Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology. Our analysis shows that lexical functions are a powerful tool that can accurately define these adjectives, by showing their subtle semantic distinctions. They are also able to capture the relations between the adjective and the noun that it co-occurs with as well as systematically describe the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of adjectival terminological units.

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of English motion verbs in the specialized field of adventure tourism and proposes a terminological description of these verbs from a lexico-semantic approach. Motion verbs play a significant role in adventure tourism as they express central actions that are carried out in this domain and connect participants, such as tourists, places and typical instruments to these actions. The analysis aims to reveal how the linguistic properties of these verbs and their interactions with participants contribute to the expression of knowledge. After stating our assumptions and reviewing previous work, the article describes a corpus-based methodology to identify relevant verbs and the different steps taken to implement their description in the DicoAdventure database. The methodology comprises three main steps and is illustrated by applying it to a set of motion verbs extracted from the Advencor corpus.

Abstract

The present paper deals with the use of English initialisms and abbreviations in the professional field of pharmaceutical business communication in Spanish. This specialized area has not yet been previously examined, and the use of initialisms and abbreviations is becoming more and more extended. The corpus consisted in an up-to-date list of thirty-seven shortened forms, which was extracted from a digital magazine addressed to pharmacists. In order to document the use of the initialisms, acronyms and abbreviations examined in Spanish, a combined analysis was carried out: firstly, the above mentioned list of initialisms and acronyms from the online magazine www.correofarmaceutico.com provided evidence about their use in written language; and secondly, the twenty-one pharmacists who answered our questionnaire provided data about practitioners’ familiarity with and the actual usage of these lexical items.

Abstract

Somewhere between technical and general vocabulary are located those words which are used in formal academic contexts with a high frequency across scientific disciplines (Farrell 1990). These are referred to as academic vocabulary. Recent findings do not support the adequacy of a single academic wordlist which can equally meet the needs of students of all disciplines (Durrant 2016), and this has inspired researchers to develop wordlists specific to each discipline. Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics is a discipline which often embraces a high number of non-English speaking students for whom it is a demanding task to engage in academic communication without having access to a ready-made resource. In the present study, a 10,781,188-word corpus based on textbooks taught in thirteen subject areas of this field was compiled. The corpus was characterized by a specified genre and time-span, and a large representative scope. It was used to draw up a list of academic words (= terminology) for students of this field. The wordlist, which is accompanied by a list of collocations, accounts for approximately 7.1% of the coverage in the corpus. The findings build on the trend toward generation of field-specific academic wordlists, which have significant implications for students, instructors, material developers and researchers.

Abstract

This paper analyses the morphosyntactic and semantic behaviour of a sample of verb-noun constructions (VNCs, Tabares Plasencia 2012) from the corpus CRIMO (Hourani Martín and Tabares Plasencia 2016), a specialised comparable corpus of different varieties of Spanish that comprises the legislation on criminal law and criminal procedure from the Hispanic states. Our analysis revealed that topolectal variation is common despite attempts by international organisations to harmonise the terminology used in this legal subdomain. It will also be demonstrated that transformations of VNCs are pragmatically motivated and conditioned by the context. Examining these transformations reveals conventions of specialised discourse and textual genre which is why their representation in terminographical tools should be considered as they are an important means for a translator to achieve the adequacy and naturalness required for legal translation.

This article reviews Langue et construction de connaisSENSes: énergie lexico-discursive et potentiel sémiotique des sciences978-2-343-11731-7

This article reviews Handbook of Terminology (Volume 2) – Terminology in the Arab world978-90-272-0198-0

This article reviews La néologie terminologique978-2-35935-226-9

This article reviews New Challenges for Research on Language for Special Purposes978-3-7329-9583-7