Meaning distinctions in terminology research

Abstract In this paper, we study how meaning of a polysemous lexical item is distinguished in a terminological research study to account for terms from the field of the environment in Brazilian Portuguese. This research is related to two multilingual terminological resources, the DiCoEnviro — Dictionnaire fondamental de l’environnement — and A framed version of DiCoEnviro , both under the coordination of the Observatoire de Linguistique Sens-Texte (OLST), Université de Montréal , Canada. The focus is on the verb poluir (to pollute), a polysemous lexical item, extracted from a corpus, especially compiled for the research, made up of scientific articles on the topic of pollution. The research draws on the lexicon-driven approach (LDA) encompassing two frameworks, Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) and Frame Semantics (FS). Based on eight methodological steps, the terminological research adopts a specific perspective on the linguistic properties of terms and on the expression of specialized knowledge in semantic frames. The results show two meanings for poluir , poluir 1a and poluir 1b , each meaning presenting a different argument structure, with a different number of arguments and semantic roles, and attributed to different frames, Contamination and Cause_Contamination respectively.