| Abstract |
The General Theory of Terminology (Wüster 1979) states that all terms must be nouns, as the noun is the only category to designate a concept. For this main reason, adjectives and other grammatical categories are not considered as entries in most terminological dictionaries. The Communicative Theory of Terminology (Cabré 1999, 2000, 2002), on the other hand, has recently determined that predicative categories, such as adjectives, verbs and adverbs, can also become specialized lexical units (SLU). However, there are not enough empirical studies at this moment which confirm this hypothesis and examine the main characteristics of these predicative categories when they are used as terms. Specifically, our contribution studies the use of adjectives as terminological units in environmental texts. The study of Environment-related terminology is of special interest, as Environment is a new emerging domain with characteristics different from those of classical domains, such as Medicine or Chemistry. As it has been established in previous works (Alonso 2009, Bracho 2004), many Environment-related words are taken from the general language, but take on a terminological sense when they are used in environmental texts.
Our study focuses on adjectives which form a collocation [N[A]SAdj]SN, as this syntactic structure is frequently used in specialized discourse. Our main objective is to determine the ‘terminological value’ of these adjectives and their main characteristics. It is concluded from the data analysis results that the behaviour of adjectives depends mainly on the syntactic-semantic nature of the adjective. It is observed a general tendency to use as terms, either classifying relational adjectives (Bosque 1993, Bosque & Picallo 1996, Picallo 2002), or common qualifying adjectives that adopt a terminological sense in specialized texts. This fact brings about the need of different kinds of treatment for the representation of these adjectives in terminological dictionaries. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX10-084,
author = {Araceli Alonso Campos, Sergi Torner Castells},
title = {Adjectives and collocations in specialized texts: lexicographical implications},
pages = {872-881},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2010},
month = {jul},
date = {6-10},
address = {Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, The Netherlands},
editor = {Anne Dykstra and Tanneke Schoonheim},
publisher = {Fryske Akademy},
isbn = {978-90-6273-850-3},
} |
