Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication - Volume 4, Issue 2, 1997

A preliminary investigation of the nature of frequency distributions of the constituent elements of terms in terminology is carried out, and the result is reported. In order to approximate the regularity of frequency distributions, MizutanVs (1953) formula based on the projection function was applied to eight lists of terms in various domains. The result of using the established frequency-distribution models is promising in that (1) the approximation is fairly good and (2) the distribution patterns of the residuals are regular, which indicates the possibility of establishing a better model for frequency distributions. However, it is also observed that the parameters change systematically according to the sample size, which means that if we are to use the models of frequency distributions to characterise the terminology by means of a given sample, then the growth of the constituent elements in a terminology should be properly taken into consideration.

Translation is a labor intensive process. We propose a general methodology for automatic terminology extraction and alignment which could substantially reduce the translator's workload. The goal is to take advantage of existing technology in terminology extraction and statistical word alignment to automatically construct a bilingual terminology lexicon by exploiting bilingual parallel aligned corpora. This paper introduces the technology in each area and discusses some simple heuristic methods for using the output from each component to build a bilingual terminology lexicon. The process is illustrated by an in-depth analysis of a single sentence pair.

Corpora are not the exclusive source of knowledge in corpus-based term extraction. In particular, pre-existing term bases can be used in conjunction with corpora for extracting terminological knowledge. The advantage is twofold: only terms which are not yet in the base are produced and semantic links are acquired between initial terms and new terminological material. This paper reports on three methods for acquiring terminological knowledge from corpora and occurrences of terms within these corpora: acquisition of terms from recurrent variants, acquisition of terms from variant deconstructions, and acquisition of morphological knowledge from approximate equalities between occurrences.

It has often been suggested that terms are not prone to variation. Moreover, many standardizing organizations and terminology textbooks take a prescriptive approach to term formation and use in which they disparage variation. However, we believe that variation is not due to arbitrariness or carelessness, but rather that it is well-motivated and useful in expert discourse. We hypothesize that multidimensional classification is one of the determining factors behind term choice and we present an empirical study of the influence of multidimensional classification on term use in which we examine variant terms in context in a one-million word corpus in the specialized subject field of optical scanning technology.

Hebrew authors, and in particular a number of prominent poets, have played an important role in the development of today's Hebrew. Compounding operations by the Polish-Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun continue this tradition by reuse of earlier language components for the application of a linguistic strategy. Most of the time it is done in accordance with normative requirements for word formation in Hebrew.The poet's reuse of biblical Hebrew language components (as linguistic and conceptual common denominators) involves three levels of usage: the primary biblical usage, choice of a marker function, and a secondary (innovative) usage of language components in compounding. The secondary usage (reuse) is a product of the interaction among a literary device (metonymy, supported by linkage to the primary source), language components (N + N compound), and a conceptual common denominator marked by the transposed usage of a known biblical language component in a new environment (a poem). I suggest that Yeshurun accomplishes systematic correspondence in compounding.Could such neologisms, or innovative compounding, be described as part of a terminologisation process ? Will the application of terminography and terminological methods of description to Yeshurun's compounds supply us with an accurate tool of research for the study of word- and term-formation strategies in Hebrew literature?