Terminology

Lesson four

“official” definition of a term

• the name or designation of a concept in a particular subject field– http://www.iso.org/iso/,

International Organisation for Standardization

(Standard ISO 1087).

Characteristics of a term

• a name – nouns– noun phrases

• unit of thought or understanding

• used in a specialized area of knowledge or activity

A trial text for term extraction• What are the ‘term candidates’ in this extract?

• What are ferns?

• Ferns are a very ancient family of plants: early fern fossils predate the beginning of the Mesozoic era, 360 million years ago. They are older than land animals and far older than the dinosaurs. They were thriving on Earth for two hundred million years before the flowering plants evolved. As we know them now, most ferns are leafy plants that grow in moist areas under forest canopy. They are “vascular plants” with well-developed internal vein structures that promote the flow of water and nutrients. Unlike the other vascular plants, the flowering plants and conifers, where the adult plant grows immediately from the seed, ferns reproduce from spores and an intermediate plant stage called a gametophyte.

Method

– Semasiological approach• Start from the text• Identify the words or groups of words

– which designate concepts– In the field of botany

- the ‘linguist’s approach’

– The subject specialist will start from the concepts

• i.e. the onomasiological approach

First identify the markers

• Typographical markers– Inverted commas– Italics– capitals

• Discourse• Conceptual markers

– ISA (is a… eg a fern is a leafy plant)– HASA (has a… see text at end of presentation)

• Discourse markers– kown as, called…

Some term candidatesvascular plantleafy plantflowering plantadult plantfernconifer

Hierarchical relationship

vascular plant (= generic term, hyperonym)

fern conifer flowering plant(= specific terms, hyponyms)

distinguishing feature? (means of reproduction)

Features: essential or non-essential?

• What distinguishes ferns, conifers, and flowering plants?– Their mode of reproduction

• spores• cones• flowers/pollen…

Do all flowering plants have leaves?

Do all ferns have leaves? - non essential feature?

Some special terms

• Mesozoicor• Mesozoic era ?

– Should we consider Mesozoic or Mesozoic era as a term?

• The latter form turns out to be a member of a series(called a paradigm):

– Cenozoic era– Mesozoic era– Paleozoic era

– therefore the term is Mesozoic era.

Taxonomies

• closed lists of terms are called nomenclatures

• arranged hierarchically, they are called taxonomies

– The Mesozoic era is further divided into the• Triassic period• Jurassic period• Cretacious period

An example from botany

• Phleum pratense (=Timothy grass) is

• – a plant, member of a kingdom (Plantae)

• – of a class (Liliopsida)

• – of a family (Poaceae)

• – of a genus (Phleum)

• - of a species (pratense)

Language markers within words making up taxonomies

• Botanical families are characterised by the –ceae suffix – in French –cée, as in poacée

- The equivalent for families in zoology is -ideae

– Many taxonomies incorporate features of the hierarchy into the morphology, as is the case with the suffixes used in natural history.

Notes on termhood

• Termhood– the quality of constituting a term

• important for– Linguists constructing a terminology from texts– Automatic term extraction

– Terms can be considered• part of a class of units of specialised meaning

Units of specialised meaning(Estopà 2001)

• USS de langage naturel– USS linguistiques monolexicales

• simples– nominales– verbales

• dérivées– nominales– verbales (desingectar)– adjectivales– adverbiales

• composées patrimoniales nominales (cuentagotas)• composées savantes nominales (nefritis)• sigles

– USS linguistiques polylexicales• Unités terminologiques polylexicales (UTP)• Unités récurrentes nominales (radiografia del pie izquierdo)• Unités phraséologiques spécialisées (UPS)

– Nominales– Verbales– Adjectivales– Adverbiales

Estopà 2001 (contd.)

• USS de langages non naturels

• 2.1 symboles

• 2.2 noms scientifiques en latin

• Estopà Bagot, Rosa, « Les unités de signification spécialisées élargissant l’objet du travail en terminologie », Terminology 7/2, 2001, p. 217‑237.

Termhood by experts: number of terms identified in corpus

• Medical doctors

• Translators

• Documentalists

• Terminologists

• 938

• 270

• 486

• 1,052

exercise

• Take the following text, which is from the same except on ferns, and extract the term candidates, going from the most specialised to the most general.

• You should find examples of ISA relationships and HASA relationships

Parts of a fern

• The leafy branch of the fern is usually called a frond. The small leaflets that make up the whole frond are called pinnae. If you look underneath a fern frond, you will often see small clumps, spots or patches that look like they are stuck onto the under surface of the pinnae. These patches are where you find the spores. The spores grow inside casings called sporangia. The sporangia may clump together into what are called sori (singular: sorus). Sometimes these sori follow the fern leaf veins, sometimes they are set into indentations in the underside of the pinna. Not every frond has spores under it: fronds that have the spores are called fertile fronds.

• .