Fachsprache Deutsch: Die Darstellung von Begriffsbeziehungen in Fachtexten

Abstract

German for Special Purposes: The Representation of Conceptual Relations in Specialized Texts

The work of terminologists is not only the elaboration of glossaries, but also includes the explanation and representation of specialized knowledge. This task is facilitated by the use of a model of lexicological analysis for term definition that is in consonance with psycholinguistic models of information processing. This also means that terminological definitions should not only reflect the meaning of specialized concepts, but also encode the cognitive-interpretative conceptual model of the entire knowledge domain.

This article describes a method for the representation of terminological units of specialized knowledge that is the basis for a terminological database of the domain of coastal engineering, and consequently, includes concepts from the specialized domains of hydrology, geology, oceanography and meteorology. The objective of such a knowledge representation consists of a conceptualization of the coastline with all of its possible characteristics (sea, shore, harbour, estuary, etc.) in a dynamic representation that can account for natural and non-natural agents, modifying processes, instruments, and affected entities.

Specialized dictionaries and a trilingual corpus of texts in German, Spanish, and English have been used to elaborate an inventory of concepts and their respective definitions. This article explains how concepts are interrelated within the same domain as well as how such relations are linguistically encoded in specialized texts. The results obtained are based on the analysis of concordances from the corpus of German texts, which have been generated by the computer application Wordsmith Tools.