Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

1353.2.2.2. Environmental ScienceAnother very relevant application of Frame Semantics and of the FrameNetmethodology to terminography is the ―frame-based approach to terminology‖ developedby Pamela Faber and her collaborators in the LexiCon research group from theUniversity of Granada (Faber et al. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009; Reimerink and Faber 2009;García de Quesada and Reimerink 2010; López Rodríguez et al. 2010; Faber 2011;León Araúz et al. 2011). This approach began with the elaboration of a database oncoastal engineering (PuertoTerm project) and developed with the elaboration of aknowledge base representing the field of environmental science (MarcoCosta andEcosistema projects). The end product, called EcoLexicon (http://ecolexicon.ugr.es), isa visual thesaurus that currently describes about 3,000 concepts and about 15,000 termsin English, Spanish and German used in the specialized field of the environmentalscience. It targets different user groups, such as translators, technical writers andenvironmental experts (León Araúz et al. 2011).The authors propose a ―frame-based organization‖ of specialized fields becausethey say that the representation of some domains cannot be static and be described onlyby means of conceptual trees, an approach often described in terminology handbooks(Sager 1990, Cabré 1993, Wright and Budin 1997). Since specialized fields areconfigurations of complex events it is necessary to situate concepts in a particularsetting and to account for dynamic processes that describe the events in a givenspecialized field. Faber et al. (2009) mention that the ―frame-based terminology‖ is acognitive approach to terminology that shares the same premises as the communicativetheory of terminology (Cabré 1999, 2000) and the sociocognitive terminology(Temmerman 2000, 2001). They also maintain that ―trying to find a distinction betweenterms and words is no longer fruitful or even viable, and that the best way to studyspecialized knowledge units is by studying their behaviour in texts‖ (Faber et al. 2009:4).