Volume 38, Issue 3

This article describes an approach for modelling domain-specific terminology in a wordnet-style representation. It uses the fundamental entities and relations introduced for the Princeton WordNet (Fellbaum 1998) and expands upon these in a way that fits for the representation of technical terms that are given in a corpus with scientific texts. The article starts with an overview on some essential semantic and lexical features of technical terms and terminological systems from the perspective of LSP research and formulates a set of requirements that derive from these characteristics for a modelling of domain-specific terminology which also aims to include terminological diversity (i.e. the existence of several terminological systems competing within the same special-field domain). Subsequently, the modelling approach with its fundamental modelling units will be introduced and the essential modelling decisions made with regard to the previously formulated requirements will be illuminated. In closing, two applications based on the modelling approach will be introduced: on the one hand a hypertext glossary of the domains “hypermedia research and text technology” which has been built in the context of the DFG-funded project “Text-grammatical foundations of text-to-hypertext conversion” at TU Dortmund University, and on the other hand the component “Grammatische Ontologie” of the grammatical online information system “Grammis” at the Institute for German Language (IDS), Mannheim.

Onomasiological dictionaries, in which the vocabulary is arranged primarily according to thematic groups, played a major role within early modern lexicography. They were used in particular as travel vocabularies in order to procure a useful stock of basic terms while abroad and also belonged to prevalent modes of teaching in the humanistic school system, especially in elementary instruction. During the second half of the 17 th century a lasting change of knowledge transfer inside this type of dictionary occurred by including illustrations which permeate not only Johann Amos Comenius' Orbis sensualium pictus but also Johann Georg Seybold's Teutsch-Lateinisches Wörterbüchlein . Both works will be conceptually explicated against the background of traditional topical lexicography and it will be shown that in both works, which mark the starting point of the history of the pictorial dictionary in the German-speaking parts, different semantic purposes of illustrations correlates with distinct vocabulary-picture-relations.

Based on the critical analysis of a specific dictionary, the present paper argues that the comment on semantics in contemporary dictionaries of language contact has to be set up in a completely different manner than that which has been used to date. Dictionaries of this type, which omit the evaluation of corpora as primary sources in favor of secondary sources, reveal systematic shortcomings in the semantic description of contact phenomena. The article focuses specifically on the temporal dimension of marking and the contemporary relevance of the semantic items. The discussed methodological issues are for the most part independent from the respective contact languages, in this case German and Italian, so that the results might be generalized.

This paper looks at a question that has up to now not yet been put, namely which textual dictionary structure elements with which features, by the use of which the user can find semantic and pragmatic knowledge within an article can systematically be differentiated. In order to do this the following four dictionary structure elements are introduced: items, item texts, functional item additions and item symbols. Then the dictionary structure elements for enabling knowledge regarding meaning are treated by means of examples, e.g. different types of items giving the meaning, different types of items giving semantically related expressions, different types of pragmatically enriched items giving the paraphrase of meaning, etc. Finally, the dictionary structure elements enabling pragmatic knowledge are discussed, e.g. different types of diasystematic labelling items and pragmatic labelling symbols. In conclusion, a brief perspective is given on the relevant approach to meaning.