Marie-Claude L’Homme

Predicative Lexical Units in Terminology

Predicative lexical units have been largely ignored in terminology for a number of reasons: one of them is the focus on entities viewed as the nodes of knowledge representations; another is the lack of linguistic perspective on the data to be represented. Things are changing though and an increasing number of researchers in the field of terminology and other areas interested in processing specialized corpora recognize that predicative units (verbs, adjectives and many nouns) play a key role in the expression and organization of specialized knowledge. However, the models traditionally used in terminology to describe terms are not equipped to capture the properties of predicative units adequately. In this contribution, I review a selection of works in the area and discuss how they aim at unveiling the contribution of predicative terms to the expression of specialized knowledge. I also show how two specific lexical semantics frameworks (Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology, ECL (Mel’cuk et al. 1984–1999, 1995) and Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1977, 1982, 1985)) can be applied to the description of predicative terms and help us represent their linguistic properties. I will refer to data taken from the specialized fields of cycling, environment and computing.

Frames and terminology: representing predicative terms in the field of the environment

Terminological resources have traditionally focused on terms referring to entities, thereby ignoring other important concepts (processes, events and properties) in specialized fields of knowledge. Consequently, large parts of the conceptual structure of these fields are not taken into consideration nor represented. In this article, we show how terms that refer to processes and events (and, to a lesser extent, properties) can be characterized using Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982) and the methodology developed within the FrameNet project (Ruppenhofer et al., 2010). More specifically, we applied the framework to a subset of terms in the field of the environment. Frames are unveiled first by comparing similarities between the argument structures of terms already recorded in a terminological database and the relationships they share with other terms. A comparison is also carried out with the lexical units recorded in FrameNet. Then, relations between frames are defined that allow us to build small conceptual scenarios that are specific to the field of the environment. These relations are determined on the basis of the set of relations listed in the FrameNet project. This article reports on the methodology, the frames defined up to now and two specific conceptual scenarios (Risk_scenario and Managing_waste).