Menzel, Katrin
Using diachronic corpora of scientific journal articles for complementing English corpus-based dictionaries and lexicographical resources for specialized languages
Proceedings of EURALEX2018, Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2018, ISBN 978-961-06-0097-8.
As technology and science permeate nearly all areas of life in modern times, there is a certain trend for standard dictionaries to bolster their technical and scientific vocabulary and to identify more components, for instance more combining forms, in technical terms and terminological phrases. In this paper it is argued that recently built diachronic corpora of scientific journal articles with robust linguistic and metadata-based features are important resources for complementing English corpus-based dictionaries and lexicographical resources for specialized languages. The Royal Society Corpus (RSC, ca. 9,800 digitized texts, 32 million tokens) in combination with the Scientific Text Corpus (SciTex, ca. 5,000 documents, 39 million tokens), as two recently created corpus resources, offer the possibility to provide a fuller picture of the development of specialized vocabulary and of the number of meanings that general and technical terms have accumulated during their history. They facilitate the systematic identification of lexemes with specific linguistic characteristics or from selected disciplines and fields, and allow us to gain a better understanding of the development of academic writing in English scientific periodicals across several centuries, from their beginnings to the present day.