Compasses, Magnets, Water Microscopes: Annotation of Terminology in a Diachronic Corpus of Scientific Texts

Compasses, Magnets, Water Microscopes Annotation and Analysis of Terminology in a Diachronic Corpus of Scientific Texts Anne-Kathrin Schumann, Stefan Fischer Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting Universität des Saarlandes, Campus A2.2, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany annek_schumann@gmx.de, stefan.fischer@uni-saarland.de Abstract The specialised lexicon belongs to the most prominent attributes of specialised writing: Terms function as semantically dense encodings of specialised concepts, which, in the absence of terms, would require lengthy explanations and descriptions. In this paper, we argue that terms are the result of diachronic processes on both the semantic and the morpho-syntactic level. Very little is known about these processes. We therefore present a corpus annotation project aiming at revealing how terms are coined and how they evolve to fit their function as semantically and morpho-syntactically dense encodings of specialised knowledge. The scope of this paper is two-fold: Firstly, we outline our methodology for annotating terminology in a diachronic corpus of scientific publications. Moreover, we provide a detailed analysis of our annotation results and suggest methods for improving the accuracy of annotations in a setting as difficult as ours. Secondly, we present results of a pilot study based on the annotated terms. The results suggest that terms in older texts are linguistically relatively simple units that are hard to distinguish from the lexicon of general language. We believe that this supports our hypothesis that terminology undergoes diachronic processes of densification and specialisation. Keywords: terminology, annotation, diachrony 1. Introduction Diachrony is an under-researched topic in terminology: Re- search efforts which are directed towards the acquisition and representation of specialised knowledge normally deal with the state of affairs at a given point in time rather than with knowledge evolution. Terminological dynamics have, at best, been researched only for very short time intervals, and have rarely been researched in a quantitative manner. The question which driving forces are behind terminolo- gisation, specialisation or lexical change in restricted do- mains has, to our knowledge, not even been touched upon. However, diachronic corpus-linguistic work on specialised texts remains incomplete if due attention is not paid to the development of the lexicon. This paper describes our efforts in the annotation of ter- minology in English scientific texts from the Royal Soci- ety Corpus (RSC) (Khamis et al., 2015). The corpus is based on the Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, a resource that has already gained some attention for its role in the construction of a specialised discourse in English (Moessner, 2009; Banks, 2008; Banks, 2009). The texts cover a wide range of do- mains, including biology, chemistry, physics, geography, and medicine. They were often written by so-called virtu- osi, or gentlemen scientists, as letters containing descrip- tions of experiments, observations, etc. Some of the texts are translations of reports originally written in a foreign lan- guage or summaries of longer pieces. The time period cov- ered is 1665–1869. In its current state, the RSC contains texts that have already been passed through a number of preprocessing steps: re- moval of OCR errors, re-ordering of …

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