STSM: Exploring Neological Terminological Collocations and Their Representation in Domain-Specific Resources
Name: Federica Vezzani
Start : 31/08/2024
End: 07/09/2024
For her STSM, Federica Vezzani visited Rute Costa at the Linguistics Center of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. The visit focused on exploring an under-researched area of lexical innovation: neological terminological collocations. The study aimed to analyze their theoretical aspects and investigate practical methods for representing them within domain-specific resources. While initially intended to cover medical and legal fields, time limitations shifted the practical emphasis to the medical domain while maintaining a theoretical focus on both.
Activities included a literature review and data collection, with attention to distinguishing terminological collocations from multi-word terms. A corpus of 9,102 documents from the MSD Manual was compiled using SketchEngine, enabling the extraction of potential terminological collocations in the medical domain. A qualitative analysis further examined relationships between nominal bases and verbal collocates, identifying cases where general terms acquired specialized meanings.
The STSM also evaluated representation methods for these collocations using different standards, such as SO TC 37 SC 3 and Ontolex-lemon, concluding that an ad hoc approach would best document these collocations within multilingual terminology resources that adopt a concept-oriented perspective. A draft report detailing the process and findings was prepared, serving as a basis for two upcoming scientific publications.