Words and patterns: lexico-grammatical patterns and semantic relations in domain-specific discourses

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses ◽

10.14198/raei.2011.24.09 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 213 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Concepción Orna-Montesinos

Keyword(s):

Linguistic Analysis ◽

Dual Role ◽

Semantic Relations ◽

Disciplinary Knowledge ◽

Lexical Resources ◽

Lexical Knowledge ◽

Underlying Assumption ◽

Construction Engineering ◽

Domain Specific

The underlying assumption of this study is the understanding of a specialized term as a summary of disciplinary knowledge, formalized at a textual level in the contextual relations which structure disciplinary lexical knowledge and are therefore essential for the successful interpretation of a text. With that aim this paper carries the analysis of the lexico-grammatical patterns which signal the hyponymy and meronymy relations of the term building, a key disciplinary concept in a corpus of construction engineering textbooks, using the WordNet database for reference. The linguistic analysis of the repertoire of lexico-grammatical patterns employed brings to the fore the dual role of hyponymy and meronymy as both semantic and metalinguistic discourse-organizing lexical resources, key in the rhetorical organization of the discourse of this discipline.

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Use of a lexical knowledge base for information access systems

Terminology ◽

10.1075/term.5.2.08mag ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 203-228 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Bernardo Magnini

Keyword(s):

Natural Language ◽

Semantic Representation ◽

Information Access ◽

Dialogue Systems ◽

Complex Sentence ◽

Lexical Resources ◽

Lexical Knowledge ◽

Word Level ◽

Sentence Level

The role of generic lexical resources as well as specialized terminology is crucial in the design of complex dialogue systems, where a human interacts with the computer using Natural Language. Lexicon and terminology are supposed to store information for several purposes, including the discrimination of semantic-ally inconsistent interpretations, the use of lexical variations, the compositional construction of a semantic representation for a complex sentence and the ability to access equivalencies across different languages. For these purposes it is necessary to rely on representational tools that are both theoretically motivated and operationally well defined. In this paper we propose a solution to lexical and terminology representation which is based on the combination of a linguistically motivated upper model and a multilingual WordNet. The upper model accounts for the linguistic analysis at the sentence level, while the multilingual WordNet accounts for lexical and conceptual relations at the word level.

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