Guest editors: Pamela Faber (University of Granada) |
Introduction
The importance of lexical semantics is increasing in terminology work. This is in consonance with the fact that word and term meaning is now in the spotlight, thanks to dictionary compilation, ontology modeling, document indexing, and information retrieval. As such, lexical semantics has become a convergence point for disciplines such as lexicography, phraseology, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, and knowledge representation, all of which are crucial to Terminology. In the initial years of Terminology, meaning, viewed as an inherent property of specialized knowledge units, was not given its due importance. In fact, terms were not even regarded as true language units but rather as mere labels for concepts. Definitions in term entries were a data field that was often filled by automatically including definitions found in other resources. However, the advent of corpus linguistics and corpus pattern analysis has brought many questions to the forefront in Terminology, such as term variation and polysemy, which were previously not envisaged in specialized language. Other issues include the identification of specialized meaning in running text, as well as the relations between terms and other lexical units. As a result, terminologists now have to deal with term meaning and how it is represented in texts. In addition, new methods for compiling specialized dictionaries and for representing knowledge require sophisticated models to account for fine-grained semantic distinctions and rich sets of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Such methods should be based on a coherent set of theoretical premises. In this sense, a number of meaning-based linguistic frameworks can be or have been usefully applied or adapted to Terminology. These include the following:
The editors invite submissions that present innovative research work or articles addressing a central conceptual, theoretical, and/or empirical investigation on lexical semantic approaches to Terminology and Specialized Languages. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
Submissions Papers should be written with Word and comprise between 20-30 pages (max. 9,000 words). More information on formatting requirements can be found on the John Benjamins website (http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/term). English is preferred (80% of the contents), but submissions in French, Spanish or German will be considered. Each issue of Terminology contains up to six or seven articles. Please send submissions to Pamela Faber (pfaber@ugr.es). Scientific Committee
Important dates
References Faber, P. and Mairal R. (1999). Constructing a Lexicon of English Verbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter |