Terms In Context

Terms in Context applies the methodology that has been developed over the last two decades in corpus linguistics to the relatively new and still little developed field of corpus-based terminography. While corpora are already being used by some terminologists for the identification of terms and retrieval of contextual fragments, this book describes the first attempt to use corpora for terminography in much the same way as large general reference corpora are already being used for general language lexicography. The author goes beyond the standard problem of identifying terms as opposed to non-terminological lexical items in text and focuses on identifying metalanguage patterns which point to the presence in text of (parts of) reusable definitions of terms. The author examines these patterns and shows how the information which they contain can be retrieved and used as input for terminological entries. Terms in Context should be of interest to 'traditional' terminologists who have not previously considered adopting a corpus-based approach to their work or at least not on the scale proposed here; to 'modern' terminologists who use text primarily for the identification of terms and the retrieval of contextual examples; to those in the corpus linguistic community who have hitherto used general language corpora for the purposes of lexicography and have not previously considered using special purpose corpora for more specific lexicography studies; and to academics in the ESP/LSP community who are interested in showing students how to use text as a means of ascertaining the meaning of terms.

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.

KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.

Context is what contributes to interpret a communicative act beyond the spoken words. It provides information essential to clarify the intentions of a speaker, and thus to identify the actual meaning of an utterance. A large amount of research in Pragmatics has shown how wide-ranging and multifaceted this concept can be. Context spans from the preceding words in a conversation to the general knowledge that the interlocutors supposedly share, from the perceived environment to features and traits that the participants in a dialogue attribute to each other. This last category is also very broad, since it includes mental and emotional states, together with culturally constructed knowledge, such as the reciprocal identification of social roles and positions. The assumption of a cognitive point of view brings to the foreground a number of new questions regarding how information about the context is organized in the mind and how this kind of knowledge is used in specific communicative situations. A related, very important question concerns the role played in this process by theory of mind abilities (ToM), both in typical and atypical populations. In this Research Topic, we bring together articles that address different aspects of context analysis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, integrating knowledge and methods derived from Philosophy of language, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Clinical Psychology.

The Corporate Terminologist is the first monograph that addresses the principles and methods for managing terminology in content production environments that are both demanding and multilingual, such as those found in global companies and institutions. It describes the needs of large corporations and how those needs demand a new, pragmatic approach to terminology management. The repurposability of terminology resources is a fundamental criterion that motivates the design, selection, and use of terminology management tools, and has a bearing on the definition of termhood itself. The Corporate Terminologist describes and critiques the theories and methods informing terminology management today, and practical considerations such as preparing an executive proposal, designing a termbase, and extracting terms from corpora are also covered. This book is intended for readers tasked with managing terminology in today’s challenging production environments, for those studying translation and business communication, and indeed for anyone interested in terminology as a discipline and practice.

This book aims to contribute to a growing interest amongst psycholinguists and morphologists in the mechanisms of meaning predictability. It presents a brand-new model of the meaning-prediction of novel, context-free naming units, relating the wordformation and wordinterpretation processes. Unlike previous studies, mostly focussed on N+N compounds, the scope of this book is much wider. It not only covers all types of complex words, but also discusses a whole range of predictability-boosting and -reducing conditions. Two measures are introduced, the Predictability Rate and the Objectified Predictability Rate, in order to compare the strength of predictable readings both within a word and relative to the most predictable readings of other coinages. Four extensive experiments indicate inter alia the equal predicting capacity of native and non-native speakers, the close interconnection between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, the important role of prototypical semes, and the usual dominance of a single central reading.

This fascinating book treats the use of words from a completely new perspective. Far from being purely abstract entities, words are believed to emerge from an interaction between morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic components. For this reason, the book draws from a vast spectrum of naturally occurring texts representing almost every style, register, and genre. It uses an extremely wide variety of language, and provides a key to help readers check their answers to the questions it poses.

The orthodox view of ancient Mediterranean slavery holds that Greece and Rome were the only 'genuine slave societies' of the ancient world, that is, societies in which slave labour contributed significantly to the economy and underpinned the wealth of elites. Other societies, labelled 'societies with slaves', have been thought to have made little use of slave labour and therefore have been largely ignored in recent scholarship. This volume presents a radically different view of the ancient world of the Eastern Mediterranean, portraying it as a patchwork of regional slave systems. Although slavery was indeed particularly highly developed in Greece and Rome, it was also entrenched in Carthage and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and played a not insignificant role in the affairs of elites in Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. In Greece, diversity was the rule: from the early archaic period onwards, differing historical trajectories in various regions shaped the institution of slavery in manifold ways, producing very different slave systems in regions such as Sparta, Crete, and Attica. However, in the wider Eastern Mediterranean world, we find a similar level of diversity: slavery was exploited to differing degrees across all of these regions, and was the outcome of a complex interplay between cultural, economic, political, geographic, and demographic variables. In seeking to contextualize slaving practices across the Greek world through detailed soundings of the slaving practices of the Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Carthaginians, this volume not only provides new insights into these ancient cultures, but also allows for a nuanced exploration of the economic underpinnings of Greek elite culture that sets its reliance on slavery within a broader context and sheds light on the complex circumstances from which it emerged.