Managing polysemy in the adventure tourism discourse with Frame Semantics

Managing polysemy in the adventure tourism discourse with Frame Semantics
Isabel Durán-Muñoz University of Málaga iduran@uma.es

1

Introduction

This paper deals with polysemy in the adventure tourism domain, a sub-domain concerning the tourism sector with a high degree of polysemy. Our main goal is to manage this linguistic phenomenon by means of a methodology proposal based on semanticframes in order to reduce ambiguity in translation and terminological work. Polysemy refers to the phenomenon that one word acquires different, though related, meanings, often with respect to particular contexts, that is, one term designating multiple concepts (M chura, 2006). Polysemy poses quite difficult problems in terminography and other applied linguistics (like translation) regardingdifferent aspects: representation of terminographical data in terminological resources (specialized dictionaries, glossaries, databases, etc.), structuring conceptual and terminological information, carrying out translations of polysemous units, among others. In order to present this study, the main purposes of our paper are the following: firstly, to briefly discuss this new line of research interminography and the assumptions of Frame Semantics; secondly, to introduce the main lexical features of the adventure tourism domain regarding polysemy and show several examples of polysemous units in this specialized domain according to the cases established; thirdly, to depict the steps to deal with this linguistic phenomenon in the domain under study, and, finally, to put forward some concludingremarks about the advantages obtained with this methodology.

have been classified in the following three groups: Case 1. A term which can be sorted under different conceptual categories (see Illustration 1). For example, “Hydrobob” is used both as an instrument and as an activity in the domain under study. Case 2. A term which is linked to a conceptual category but which is used in differentcommunicative situations and thus, presents specific features according to its related terms. For example, the term “Board” is employed as an instrument in a number of adventure activities but presents different features according to the specific activity it is used in (kitesurf, water skiing, windsurf). Case 3. A term which refers to several concepts (and thus meanings) in one language but hasdifferent translation equivalents according to the several concepts it denotes. For example, the term “Kayak” in Spanish refers to two different concepts: (instrument) and (activity) but in English the same instrument is called “Kayak” and the activity is “Kayaking.” This provokes a clear anisomorphism in the two languages at the terminological level. As it is observed, polysemy is difficult to handleat a terminological level, since one unit refers to several concepts and meanings and, moreover, can have different translation equivalents. Likewise, it is difficult to represent this phenomenon on terminological resources (specialized dictionaries, databases, etc.).

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Frame-based methodology

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Polysemy in the adventure tourism discourse

The adventure tourism terminology providesplenty of examples of polysemous units, which

Our paper proposes a methodology to cope with polysemy from a conceptual level, that is, a methodology that takes advantage of the conceptual representation in order to facilitate the management of this linguistic phenomenon. Our methodology follows the most recent lines of ontology-based modern terminology research,
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WS 2 Workshop ExtendedAbstracts, 9th International Conference on Terminology and Artificial Intelligence, TIA 2011, pages 40–42 Paris, 10 November 2011

such as Termontography (Kerremans et al., 2003); Ontoterminology (Roche, 2009) or Ontoterminography (Durán-Muñoz, 2011/ forthcoming). Consequently, the proposed methodology is also corpus-based, descriptive, and systematic and in line with specialized lexicography....