Inclusion vs. exclusion of hypernym in subordinate terminological items: the problem of semantic dispersion and transparency
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The structure of lexical hierarchies corresponds quite accurately to their underlying hierarchical conceptual systems. While the superordinate notion is always included in the denotation of concepts at subordinate levels, explicit reference to superordinate entities in names of subordinate items in lexical hierarchies is not the rule. The names at subordinate levels do not often contain the word(s) denoting superordinate entities, thus they are not very transparent and increase semantic dispersion. The paper looks into distribution of hypernymic terms in the names of subordinate, more specific items in the hierarchy. This distribution of meaning has been observed in organised lexical families, namely in some well-established biological terminologies, aiming to identify the rules governing distribution of hypernymic lexical units or their head words. At the same time, attention is paid to the choices of characteristic properties used in the onomatological process and their linguistic expression, drawing a comparison with Latin and Czech when necessary. As the typical terminological item has the form of a noun compound, the findings of the research have been used to compile a semantically conditioned typology of compounds based on the corpus of terms from selected terminological areas. |