Pamela Faber

A cognitive linguistics view of terminology and specialized language

Terminology and Cognitive Linguistics have common areas of focus. Topics such as conceptual structure, category organization, knowledge representation, and metaphor are relevant to both. This book shows how Cognitive Linguistics can be applied to specialized language within the context of Frame-based Terminology, a new cognitive approach to specialized knowledge units.

Translation Competence and Language Awareness

One of the most difficult things translators have to learn is how to extract conceptual meanings from source texts, so that they base their translations on reformulations of those meanings, rather than on the words or structures that codify them. This article describes an exercise in lexical analysis, involving verbs of sound in English and Spanish. Its aim is to enable students to discover underlying patterns of meaning which are representative of lexical-conceptual structure. Through this type of activity, students explore the relation between language and thought, while also increasing their dictionary skills and awareness.

Reviewing imagery in resemblance and non-resemblance metaphors

Abstract This article analyses the nature of mental imagery in metaphoric thought as envisaged by the contemporary theory of metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff, Cambridge University Press, 1993). Our study of metaphor in the field of marine biology draws on two crucial aspects of mental imagery, namely dynamicity and pervasiveness. Image metaphors and behaviour-based metaphors have generally been regarded as two different types of resemblance metaphor. In our view, the dynamicity of certain mental images highlights inherent similarities between these two types of metaphor, and makes the differences between them more apparent than real. For this reason, we propose a more refined description of resemblance metaphors in terms of the static or dynamic nature of the mental images underlying them. Our study also underlines the fact that mental images permeate all classes of metaphor, and that the pervasiveness and dynamicity of mental images affords insights into both resemblance metaphors and non-resemblance metaphors.

Representing environmental knowledge in ecolexicon

EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on the environment, which provides an internally coherent information system covering a wide range of specialized linguistic and conceptual needs. Our research has mainly focused on conceptual modeling with a view to offering a user-friendly multimodal interface. The dynamic interface of EcoLexicon combines conceptual, linguistic, and graphical information and is primarily hosted in a relational database that has been recently linked to an ontology. One of the main challenges that we have faced in the development of our TKB is the information overload generated by the specialized domain. This is not only due to the wide scope and applicability of environmental concepts, but especially to the fact that multiple dimensions of their meaning definition or conceptual description are not always compatible but rather context-dependent. As a result, concepts with an information overload have been reconceptualized according to two contextual factors: domain membership and semantic role. This reduces the amount of conceptual information accessed by the user, and makes the knowledge representation easier to process.

Strategies for the Semi-Automatic Retrieval of Metaphorical Terms

This article proposes a method for the semi-automatic extraction of resemblance metaphor terms from a manually annotated corpus of marine biology texts in English and Spanish. The corpus was first searched for target domain terms as well as for lexical markers indicative of metaphors. The combination of these search strategies for metaphor extraction resulted in a set of English-Spanish term pairs. After analysing and comparing these metaphor candidates, a quantitative analysis provided comparative statistical data regarding marine biology metaphor. Finally, the metaphorical nature of marine biology terms was verified in three ways. The first verification strategy entailed an adapted version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007). The second involved the analysis of contextual data extracted from the corpus, and the third involved the analysis of visual images from an online marine biology database and from the Google search engine.

Multidimensional and Multimodal Information in EcoLexicon

EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on the environment that targets different user groups who wish to expand their knowledge of the environment for the purpose of text comprehension and/or generation. Users can freely access EcoLexicon, and are able to find the information needed, thanks to a user-friendly visual interface with different modules for conceptual, linguistic, and graphical data. The main goal of this TKB is user knowledge acquisition. This paper briefly explains the theoretical premises and methodology applied in EcoLexicon for knowledge extraction and representation. It also shows how environmental concepts are represented, interrelated, and contextualized. EcoLexicon combines the advantages of a relational database, allowing for a quick deployment and feeding of the platform, and an ontology, enhancing user queries. The internal coherence at all levels of a dynamic knowledge representation shows that even complex domains can be represented in a user-friendly way.

Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context

Though instrumental in numerous disciplines, context has no universally accepted definition. In specialized knowledge resources it is timely and necessary to parameterize context with a view to more effectively facilitating knowledge representation, understanding, and acquisition, the main aims of terminological knowledge bases. This entails distinguishing different types of context as well as how they interact with each other. This is not a simple objective to achieve despite the fact that specialized discourse does not have as many contextual variables as those in general language (i.e., figurative meaning, irony, etc.). Even in specialized text, context is an extremely complex concept. In fact, contextual information can be specified in terms of scope or according to the type of information conveyed. It can be a textual excerpt or a whole document; a pragmatic convention or a whole culture; a concrete situation or a prototypical scenario. Although these versions of context are useful for the users of terminological resources, such resources rarely support context modeling. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of context primarily based on scope (local and global) and further divided into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic facets. These facets cover the specification of different types of terminological information, such as predicate-argument structure, collocations, semantic relations, term variants, grammatical and lexical cohesion, communicative situations, subject fields, and cultures.

Context and Terminology in the Multilingual Semantic Web

One of the main challenges of the Multilingual Semantic Web (MSW) is ontology localization. This first needs a representation framework that allows for the inclusion of different syntactic, lexical, conceptual and semantic features, but it also needs to account for dynamism and context from both a monolingual and multilingual perspective. We understand dynamism as the changing nature of both concepts and terms due to contextual constraints, whereas context is defined by the different pragmatic factors that modulate such dynamism (e.g. specialized domains, cultures, communicative situations). Context is thus an important construct when describing the concepts and terms of any domain in monolingual resources. However, in multilingual resources, context also affects interlingual correspondences. When dealing with multilingual ontologies, context features must be extended to include translation relations and degrees of equivalence.

THE DEPICTION OF WHEELS BY BLIND CHILDREN: PRELIMINARY STUDIES ON PICTORIAL METAPHORS, LANGUAGE, AND EMBODIED IMAGERY*

Blind (and visually impaired) children make use of perceptual cues from multimodal sensory input of known objects when they draw. In this study, we examined drawings of spinning wheels made by 12-year-old congenitally blind children. The drawings can be analyzed in terms of metaphoric and metonymic mappings from perceptual cues of different objects. Just as metaphoric language is understood through embodiment, the drawings are made through embodiment or perceptual symbolic simulations that have their parallel in language. We considered the relation between metaphor in haptic drawings and language from the perspective of situated simulation in which imagery, motion, and introspection play a crucial role in the shaping of concepts. Reference corpora offer evidence of the verbal correlates of such simulations in English and Spanish.

The lexical field of visual perception in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

In The French Lieutenants Woman the lexical field of visual perception is strongly foregrounded. The appearance of so many significant vision words, both the superordinate terms and their hyponyms, is related to the creation of the characters and to the development of the narrative. This article sets out the lexical field of visual perception, its hierarchies, oppositions and metaphorical projections, both at the beginning and in the appendices, showing how this semantic domain is covered in the novel. We go on to suggest that this foregrounding has a literary purpose, and indicate five distinct functions. It can also be explained by the peculiar genesis of this novel as a visual image, attested to by Fowles himself. The novelists use of visual perception terms throws light on how a postmodem writer of self-conscious fiction works through making choices inside and outside restricted fields.