Les techniques d’imagerie cérébrale peuvent être employées dans la recherche des connaissances spécialisées afin de découvrir la façon dont les concepts spécialisés sont représentés dans le cerveau. L’étude d’IRMf décrite dans cet article porte sur la perception des unités lexicales générales et spécialisées, ainsi que de leurs significations sémantiques, chez des sujets spécialistes en géologie et des sujets non-experts. Les sujets ont effectué des tâches d’appariement sémantique par rapport à des mots de la langue générale et à des termes spécialisés faisant partie de la catégorie sémantique des instruments, soit ménagers soit spécialisés. Les résultats indiquent que le traitement des termes spécialisés repose sur l’expérience préalable des sujets avec l’objet, ce qui confirme l’hypothèse que, lors de l’exécution d’une tâche spécialisée, les spécialistes activent une partie du cerveau différente de celle utilisée par les non-experts. L’expérience nous a permis d’obtenir des données significatives sur les systèmes cérébraux impliqués dans ces processus cognitifs.

Legal language and its translation are considerably more complex than scientific and technical translation because the legal object is a text that performs an action. For this reason it is not only necessary to consider the legal terminology but also the structure of the text itself as well as the verbs used and their performative act. In this paper, we explore how the analysis of terminological meaning in legal texts can be addressed from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (FBT), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In a case study on international agreements in the context of environmental law, we analyze the argument structure of verbs as well as the conceptual categories of their semantic arguments providing insights into the semantic profile of this text type. The representation of the verb class and its semantic arguments can be considered a type of interlingua that could be used as a basis for translation.

Reutilization and interoperability are major issues in the fields of knowledge representation and extraction, as reflected in initiatives such as the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data Cloud. This paper shows how terminological resources can be integrated and reused within different types of application. EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on environmental science that integrates conceptual, linguistic and visual information. It has led to the following by-products: (i) the EcoLexicon English Corpus; (ii) EcoLexiCAT, a terminology-enhanced translation tool; and (iii) Manzanilla, an image annotation tool. This paper explains EcoLexicon and its by-products, and shows how the latter exploit and enhance the data in the TKB.

Despite its importance, environmental law has largely been ignored in environmental knowledge bases. This may be due to the fact that legal issues may not, strictly speaking, be considered scientific knowledge in environmental knowledge resources, which may in turn relate to the complexity of reflecting the cultural component (which includes different legal systems) in the description of terms and concepts. The terminological knowledge base EcoLexicon has recently begun to include information on environmental law. This paper takes the methodological perspective of frame-based terminology to analyze typical verb collocations in environmental law that will be added to the phraseology module of EcoLexicon. Corpus analysis was used to compare the behavior of verbs collocating with pollution in environmental science and environmental law. Verbs were classified based on lexical domains and semantic classes through definition factorization, as described in the Lexical Grammar Model. The differences were mostly based on the specificity of the arguments and the emphasis on the polluter in environmental law. This resulted in a proposal for the inclusion and configuration of environmental law phraseology in EcoLexicon, showing sociocultural differences across environmental subdomains.