Seven Good Reasons for a Better Account of Fine-grained Polysemy in Terminological Resources

Abstract

A quick look at terminological resources can give the wrong impression that polysemy is something that occurs only occasionally in specialized domains. These kinds of resources seldom account for the different meanings a linguistic unit or expression can carry in the same domain and, even when they do, the distinction between closely related meanings is not explained in ways that would allow unfamiliar users to grasp them correctly. This can be explained partly by the fact that polysemy is considered to be reduced or non-existent in specialized subject fields. It can also be explained by the theoretical assumption still relayed in some textbooks that the “ideal” term is typically monosemic. However, multiple meanings do co-exist in given specialized domains and corpora and many reasons would justify a more adequate treatment of polysemy in resources. We examine seven reasons in this article: subject field boundaries are not enough; imprecise definitions; general language dictionaries are not enough; different meanings affect combinatorics; lexical relations are linked to distinct meanings; different government patterns; different equivalence relations.