The Use of Framing to Conceptualize Specialized Terminology
357understanding of a single terminological unit depends on its embedding
within a larger action-based context. The context-dependence of word
meaning is of course not limited to specialized language but rather a given
in a cognitive linguistic approach to meaning (Evans and Green 2006). It
is the definition and set-up of the frame itself then, which determines the
domain-specific semantics of a lexical item.
The following section presents a frequency list compiled from the
scientific corpus. This word list should provide the reader with some
insight on the degree of specialization captured by the lexical realizations
in these texts. Following that, I choose two lexemes in particular to
exemplify meaning construction based on collocating words. The
collocation analyses aims to show what words typically co-occur with the
keyword, as well as what semantic/conceptual domains are captured by the
collocates. Based on this categorization, I aim to construct a frame
template by determining the obligatory frame components and their
relationships. I argue that such a conceptual frame serves as a tool in
understanding individual terminology.
Results and discussion
Frequency lists from the corpus
After extracting a stop list from the overall corpus, the total number of
word tokens is 581’989 and the word types amount to 29’130. Table 1
presents a frequency list of the corpus (lemmatized).
Rank Frequency Word Rank Frequency Word
1 8655 food 26 1796 difference
2 4328 sample 27 1738 starch
3 4284 product 28 1658 preference
4 3134 high 29 1610 process
5 3084 study 30 1594 fig
6 2969 sensory 31 1532 bread
7 2958 effect 32 1510 method
8 2872 consumer 33 1510 time
9 2604 quality 34 1460 protein
10 2432 value 35 1440 hedonic
11 2420 content 36 1357 significant
12 2401 science 37 1345 attribute
13 2227 different 38 1328 wheat