In the information age we have more accessible data than ever before. At the same time there is undoubtedly a greater information need than ever before. We can distinguish between at least three types of information needs: communicative, cognitive and operational. Dictionaries will normally focus on one or more communicative functions, encyclopaedias normally on cognitive functions, user guides and manuals focus on operational functions. To perform such functions, we need reference books containing the necessary data. This is a main topic both in metalexicography and in terminography. Far less observations have been made to the no less important question: How and especially how quick can the user get access to the data ?

This article presents the qualitative analysis of a corpus of published linguistics articles. Two types of lexical markers were studied: those signaling convergence (e.g. conformément à nos attentes) or signaling divergence (e.g. contre toute attente), in relation to the expectations of the writer-researcher or of the larger scientific community. The objective of this study is to examine to what extent these markers reveal the way the writer-researcher constructs and validates knowledge in their article. The corpus analysis found several functions for these markers, thus highlighting a wide variety of possible expectations. As a result, we argue that such an analysis must not only see these markers as linked to other terms but must also to take into account their relation to the entire text. Therefore, markers of convergence and divergence may not necessarily be the locus of an implied scientific reasoning. However, they potentially express various epistemological styles.

The aim of this article is to contrast interrogative sentences in French with their English counterparts in academic discourse, using a sample of translated examples. Questions are highly frequent in French, but not in English. In French, questions involve the addressee as a fictitious anchor-point without taking his / her point of view into account. In English, interrogative sentences appear either in embedded position or as supplements. Enunciative location may only be achieved by the main clause. In this way, modal – as opposed to intersubjective – distancing is created in English.

Technical texts present interesting and so far poorly researched linguistic characteristics. In this article, a research project is described, carried out by a multidisciplinary group of linguists and computer scientists, which aims at devising and realising prototypes of computer programmes for extracting information from technical texts. This research, as is illustrated by concrete examples, has led to computer programmes that have the form either of networks between concepts or of phrases taken from the analysed texts, and that are, if necessary, accompanied by automatically assigned semantic information.

In this paper, we propose a first step leading to the description of the lexicon of scientific language by identifying a transdisciplinary scientific lexicon (TSL). The TSL is domain independent and forms a central lexical core of all domains; it is at the center of argumentation we find in scientific discourse as well as its structuring. In order to gather the transdisciplinary lexicon, we use natural language processing (NLP) tools and statistical techniques; central to our method is the calcul des spécificités (specificity measure) put forward by Lafon (1980). By using NLP tools, we want to verify if it is possible to quickly and simply complement existing lexical resources without much manual intervention. We conclude our study by exploring an observation made by Phal (1971) about collocations and scientific discourse. We focus here on V-N collocations revolving around nouns taken from our TSL.

Since September 11 2001 the world has been faced with challenges to the defence of nations and the security of their citizens, leading to hitherto unused laws, policies and strategies to counter the terrorist threat. This is a major challenge: to reconcile security needs with the demands of law, and respecting citizens' liberty, their language, their culture and their legitimate aspirations. In this paper, antiterrorist discourse will first be studied, its terms and definitions examined, as well as the types of texts used and the way they are formulated in language. Then the cross-disciplinary approach is used to produce practical methods to ascertain the state of terrorist threat in its international dimension, to achieve a fine grained but global understanding of the phenomenon for the future.

Haitian society is characterized by a number of dichotomies which are manifested in law in the form of an unequal bilingualism and a particular form of bijuralism. The legal integration of the Nation implies that the law be expressed in creole and that customary standards should be taken into account in written law. These measures would enrich substantive law in Haiti, though complex to implement.

Many psycholinguistic and ergonomic studies on procedural texts have, directly or indirectly, addressed the question of the effect of information order on user's processing. Results obtained in these studies gave rise to three general conclusions : (1) the way procedural texts are read, understood and their instructions followed depends on information order ; (2) initial mention of the main information (i. e. superordinate information) in texts, information blocks and sentences facilitates the processing of the text ; (3) the order of information effect depends on multiple factors such as : users' strategies, users' prior knowledge, referent and situation structures.

Online tourist guides are information tools communicating destination image and specialised knowledge at the same time. They feature a large variety of lexicographic structures including word lists, articles, conceptual schemes, indexes and registers, search options on keywords, internal and external cross references etc. This is by no means surprising in so far as what is needed is effective data access in order to extract information – precisely in the same way as in lexicography. The functional thesis we defend in this article is that lexicographisation in a user perspective can improve the access process. Taking œnotouristic online guides as a case in point, we will examine different user situations leading to consultation, in particular the need for experiential information, in which users simply wish to improve the conditions of their œnotouristic experience. We will then formulate theoretical proposals aimed at ensuring better interaction of lexicographic functions, data presentation and access possibilities.

Relational adjectives are a key component of specialized language in French as well as many other languages. The use of relational adjectives as a substitute for a prepositional phrase follows the principle of economy in language, but it is also a characteristic of specialized discourse: French physicians will use expressions like “cancer mammaire” or “infarctus myocardique” where the layman uses “cancer du sein” or “infarctus du myocarde”. After studying morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects of relational adjectives, we attempt to identify some of the factors that seem to induce the use of relational adjectives instead of prepositional phrase complements, based on examples drawn from an eight-million-word corpus of medical research articles; variation in the use of the adjectives coronaire and coronarien is also studied.

This study aims at developing a method for investigating the invariants across different scientific discourses. The paper illustrates a model analysis for processing general scientific vocabulary by applying three complementary approaches: cross-disciplinary, onomasiological and phraseological. The combination of these approaches allows us to bypass traditional methods generally based on a lexical analysis of a single domain. We first define the borderline between the specialised scientific language features and those features that are common to various scientific discourses, then we present a corpus-based study of a combinatorial profile of lexical resources used for formulating general scientific ideas. This method thus provides a framework for the modelling of general scientific language resources.

This paper presents concepts and systems for multilingual terminological and textual knowledge codification, representation, validation, management and sharing structured around the notion of genre. These systems operationalize the different stages of the ‘virtuous knowledge cycle’ within a dynamic, multilingual specialized web-dictionary and a multilingual, genre-based corpus of medical texts genre hierarchies or systems. The knowledge cycle approach mirrors ‘real life’ working processes and allows for repeated conversions of knowledge between its tacit and explicit forms, allowing knowledge to codify and spiral up from the individual to the collective level at corporate, ‘community of practice’. The paper reports on the results of the implementation of these concepts and systems in general and the web-dictionary in particular within the Danish health care, pharmaceutical, medical device and translation sectors which technologically have been fused into one collective ‘knowledge cluster’ and it discusses the opportunities for research and business that spring from fusion of language and health technologies.

The food and non-food terms from big stores deserve a thorough analysis: in today's self-service shopping, labels mentioning these denominations sell the products, together with the brand of the concern making them; second, this increasingly international terminology is currently coined or corrected with marketing and publicity specialists; last but not least, these terms include a series of vulgarized scientific ones which help understand vulgarization mechanisms.

The importance of the role of metadiscourse is increasingly recognized for natural language processing applications like text-mining and information extraction. Thus the detection of metadiscourse has recently been identified as a task in several domains, including the processing of scientific literature. We have developed a natural language processing system that detects and highlights in biomedical research abstracts a particular kind of metadiscourse that conveys the author’s rhetorical strategy. In this paper we describe the model of rhetorical metadiscourse underlying the system. Our model, combining and extending previous discourse analysis methods and models, is based on both conceptual and syntactic analyses of metadiscourse. We argue that this model is effective for automatic processing.