Entropic characterisation of termino-conceptual structure : A preliminary study (2019)

Abstract: Terms represent concepts, which consist of conceptual characteristics. In actual concept-term formation, which is done by researchers, the process is in reverse: conceptual elements/characteristics are consolidated to form concepts, which are represented by terms. As concepts do not exist on the fly, what we may call termino-conceptual system provides scaffolding in this process. Terminologists, both in practice and in research, do not only collect and list terms but also analyse, describe and define terms and systematise terminologies. To carry out these tasks, terminologists must refer to conceptual systems, to the extent that they contribute to systematising terminologies; terminologists thus also deal with the sphere of termino-conceptual system. In this paper, we consolidate the status of termino-conceptual sphere and propose a way to characterise the structure of termino-conceptual system by using entropy. The entropic characterisation of English terminologies of six domain, i.e. agriculture, botany, chemistry, computer science, physics and psychology are presented.

## introduction in societies of which technologies and specialised knowledge are inherent part, understanding of specialised concepts and proper treatment of technical terms are required in many social activities. terminologists, both in practice and in research, play an important role in the activities that involve technical communication, including technical translation. the task of terminologists are not only to collect terms but also to analyse, describe and define terms and to systematise terminologies. in order to carry out these tasks, terminologists refer to conceptual systems that underline terminologies. concepts of a domain are formed and named as terms by researchers of the domain. concepts consist of characteristics, and concept formation can be approximately regarded as structurisation of conceptual characteristics. this process is bound by existing conceptual system and terminology @xcite . as terminological naming tends towards "transparency and consistency" @xcite , representational structure of terminologies reflect conceptual system to a substantial extent. we can identify here a system consisting of conceptual characteristics and concepts not in their abstract existence but as represented by terminologies, which we may call a sphere of "termino-conceptual" system. this sphere operates implicitly as scaffolding for researchers in their activities, while it constitutes, in a sense, the main target of terminological work, as terminologists are concerned with terms and concepts to the extent that they are relevant to terminology processing and management. nevertheless, this sphere itself has not been the explicit reflective target of terminological research @xcite . against this backdrop, this paper tries to consolidate the sphere of termino-conceptual system, introduces a simple information-theoretic approach to characterise the termino-conceptual structure, and analyses and characterises english terminologies of six domains, i.e. agriculture, botany, chemistry, computer science, physics and psychology. terms represent concepts, which consist of conceptual characteristics. terms are "motivated" (de saussure, 1911) to a substantial degree, representing important characteristics of the concepts by constituent elements of complex terms. for instance, "brain tumour" represents the concept of "the growth of abnormal cells (tumour) in the tissues of the brain" 1 . two conceptual characteristics, i.e. tumour as the genus concept and brain, the body part, as the core differentiating characteristic, are represented as nucleus and determinant of this term, respectively. a substantial amount -around 80 percent -of terms in most domains in many languages are complex @xcite . these complex terms represent important conceptual characteristics while at the same time showing the relative position of concepts represented by terms within the conceptual system @xcite . as a first step, therefore, we can approximate the termino-conceptual system by means of the surface structure of terminologies, under some simplifying assumptions: (a) constituent elements of terms represent conceptual characteristics without ambiguities; (b) terms represent important conceptual characteristics by their constituent elements; and (c) the structure of complex terms reflect the position, i.e. the nucleus and the determinants, of conceptual characteristics. we basically adopt here that terms/concepts are formed by combining constituent elements/conceptual characteristics. this approximation can enable us to observe differences in linguistic representations of concepts in different domains or in different languages. under the assumptions adopted here, we can define layers of characterising termino-conceptual structure, starting from a set of conceptual characteristics (cf. @xcite : note that these layers are not for describing or analysing given terms or terminologies, but for characterising the termino-conceptual sphere that underlies given terms and terminologies, from the point of view of the organisation of conceptual characteristics. we can regard the status of termino-conceptual sphere to given terms and terminologies as somewhat analogous to the status of "language model" to given corpus data in nlp, although the compositional elements and their arrangements of the models and the theoretical status are different 2 . ## analysis of english terminologies of six domains here we analyse and describe the termino-conceptual structures of english terminologies, based on the theoretical and methodological framework defined in section 2.