The Use of Framing to Conceptualize Specialized Terminology
363(7) ...to expand demand across different quality grades, significant increases
in price should be avoided when consumption is price-sensitive as the case
of peas. (FQP 41).The 3-part collocation different quality grades in (7) describes the official
standards in food assessment. These grades are important for both the
evaluation of food products in national and international comparison, as
well as for the successful marketing/selling of a food item.
A tentative semantic categorization of the R1 collocates in Table 2 may
include the following four categories:
- The food product at stake (e.g. food, product)
- The type of quality investigation (e.g. evaluation, control,
assessment, analysis) - The assessed quality feature (e.g. attribute, characteristic,
parameter, property, perception, feature, aspect) - The dimension of quality assessment (e.g. grade, index, change,
preference, category, classification, retention)
In line with the discussion of the L1 collocates of quality, a closer look at
the R1 collocates reveals that the linguistic contextualization of quality
specifies its semantics. Examples (8) and (9) contain explicit explanations
of terminology-specific use of quality:
(8) There are many quality attributes for fish and fishery products, among
them freshness is one of the most important ones (FST 63.2)
(9) In the meat industry, discrimination, or classification is one of the critical
quality control stages. (FST 60.2.Part1)In (8), the referential meaning of quality attributes is exemplified with
freshness as a core attribute is the assessment of fish. Similarly, in (9), two
types of quality control assessment are demonstrated, namely discrimination
and classification.
A look at the linguistic environment of quality provides evidence for
two main characteristics of the specialized language found in the corpus:
Firstly, linguistic co-occurrences contribute to the semantic precision of
terminological units. While this phenomenon is not exclusive to scientific
language, communication in specialized fields relies on semantic precision
in order to enable mutual understanding amongst interlocutors. Secondly,
scientific terminology presents a symbiotic relationship between
specialized notions, for instance, in Example (9), quality control stages are
exemplified with such examples as discrimination and classification,