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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 candidates
vascular plant
leafy plant
flowering plant
adult plant
fern
conifer
Hierarchical relationship
vascular plant
(= generic term, hyperonym)
fern
conifer
flowering plant
(= specific terms, hyponyms)
distinguishing feature?
(means of reproduction)
Features: essential or nonessential?
• 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
• Mesozoic
or
• 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
–
–
•
dérivées
–
–
–
–
•
•
•
–
nominales
verbales
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
• 938
• Translators
• 270
• Documentalists
• 486
• Terminologists
• 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.
• .