The interpretation of corpus semantics: the case of terminology construction

The aim of this paper is to focus on the necessity of a double marking-out when doing the semantic analysis of the data of a corpus. The first mark lies in the situation in which texts are produced and the second one lies in the interpretation of the texts. In both cases, the author suggests to use the notion of genre (textual genre and interpretative genre) in order to classify and categorize situations. The issue is exemplified by the problem of the building of terminologies according to a particular interpretative genre. The paper shows how textual genre influences the functioning of conceptual relations patterns (e.g., the preposition avec is used to spot a meronymic relation). It demonstrates that this kind of analysis may help to refine the descriptions initially made by introspection.