Cognitive Approaches to Specialist Languages

The Use of Framing to Conceptualize Specialized Terminology

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Figure 2. A frame template for understanding sensory scientific terminology.

The event portrayed in Figure 2 can be roughly paraphrased as follows: An

assessor initiates an examination or manipulation of an object, which

results in a specific outcome. This process may be subject to

standardization, for instance to allow an exact reproducibility of the

operationalization. Specifications of the roles include, for example,

whether the assessor is a human subject or an instrument, or whether the

outcome refers to a product’s change of state or a to an assessor’s

liking/disliking of a product.

The sequential structure of the frame, moving from left to right

horizontally, is reflected in two ways in the use of specialized language.

Communicatively, this process is displayed in the set-up of the specialized

text and in the utterance. The studies are organized such that they guide

the reader through the specific research activity as reflected in the frame

template (cf. Diederich 2015). Furthermore, the lexical embedding of the

keywords (quality, protein) syntactically corresponds with the conceptual

sequence of the procedures. This is exemplified in (13):

(13) In order to obtain a relatively objective conclusion, all members had

gained unified guidance and evaluation practice training about the sensory

quality features of litchi fruits, and according to a five-point hedonic scale

(1 point means poor and 5 points means excellent) they could give the very

close scores of sensory quality of the same litchi samples after the

evaluation training (FST 60.2.Part1).

We can allocate the agents and activities in (13) to the various frame

components in Figure 2. The lexeme members refers to the members of the

panel, thus denoting human assessors. This examination is encoded in

evaluation practice. The food samples at stake, litchi fruits, are assessed

with regard to particular sensory quality features. While the referential

meaning of sensory quality features may not be clear at first, the semantics

are illuminated to a certain extent with the specification of the evaluation

practice as hedonic evaluation. The frame template in Figure 2 presents a

Assessor initiates Examination/Manipulation affects Object results Reaction/Outcome Standardization process