Chapter 11

Terminology and Lexical Semantics

The relationship between Terminology and Linguistics has fluctuated, depending on the prevalence of specific applications at a given time. A conceptual basis remains important in applications such as knowledge representation, and standardization, but other applications rely more heavily on corpora and must take into consideration the linguistic behavior of terms. This chapter lists questions that arise when analyzing terms in text and reviews some proposals made by Lexical Semantics to address them. Lexical semantic frameworks allow us to take into consideration terms that are often overlooked, such as verbs and adjectives. They also offer interesting ways to model various terminological relations (including collocations). Also emphasized is the fact that knowledge-based and lexicon-based approaches are only compatible to a certain extent.