This paper reports on a research carried out at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) on a set of idiomatic nautical expressions in Italian and English. A total of 200 Italian expressions were first selected and examined, using both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as specific lexicographical works dealing with the subject of idiomaticity, especially of the maritime type, and a similar undertaking was then conducted for the English expressions. We discuss the possibility of including both the Italian and English idiomatic expressions in the semantic database Mariterm, which contains terms belonging to the maritime domain. We describe the terminological database and the way in which the idiomatic expressions can be organised within the system, so that, similarly to the other synsets, they are connected to other concepts represented in the database, but at the same time continue to belong to a group of particular linguistic expressions. Furthermore, we study similarities and differences in meaning and usage of some idiomatic expressions in the two languages.

A research has been carried on and is still in progress aimed at the construction of three specialized lexicons organized as databases of relational type. The three databases contain terms belonging to the specialized knowledge fields of maritime terminology (technical-nautical and maritime transport domain), taxation law, and labour law with union labour rules, respectively. The EuroWordNet/ItalWordNet model was firstly used to structure the terminological database of maritime domain. The methodology experimented for its construction was applied to construct the next databases. It consists in i) the management of corpora of specialized languages and ii) the use of generic databases to identify and extract a set of candidate terms to be codified in the terminological databases. The three specialized resources are described highlighting the various kinds of lexical semantic relations linking each term to the others within the single terminological database and to the generic resources WordNet and ItalWordNet. The construction of these specialized lexicons was carried on in the framework of different projects; but they can be seen as a first nucleus of an organized network of generic and specialized lexicons with the purpose of making the meaning of each term clearer from a cognitive point of view.

Particular uses of PNs with sense extension are focussed on and inspected taking into account the presence of PNs in lexical semantic databases and electronic corpora. Methodology to select ad include PNs in semantic databases is described; the use of PNs in corpora of Italian Language is examined and evaluated, analyzing the behaviour of a set of PNs in different periods of time. Computational resources can facilitate our study in this field in an effective way by helping codify, translate and handle particular cases of polysemy, but also guiding in metaphorical and metonymic sense recognition, supported by the ontological classification of the lexical semantic entities. The relationship between the “abstract” and the “concrete”, which is at the basis of the Conceptual Metaphor perspective, can be considered strictly related to the variation of the ontological values found in our analysis of the PNs and their belonging classes which are codified in the ItalWordNet database.

This paper reports on the main phases of a research which aims at enhancing a maritime terminological database by means of a set of terms belonging to meteorology. The structure of the terminological database, according to EuroWordNet/ItalWordNet model is described; the criteria used to build corpora of specialized texts are explained as well as the use of the corpora as source for term selection and extraction. The contribution of the semantic databases is taken into account: on the one hand, the most recent version of the Princeton WordNet has been exploited as reference for comparing and evaluating synsets; on the other hand, the Italian WordNet has been employed as source for exporting synsets to be coded in the terminological resource. The set of semantic relations useful to codify new terms belonging to the discipline of meteorology is examined, revising the semantic relations provided by the IWN model, introducing new relations which are more suitably tailored to specific requirements either scientific or pragmatic. The need for a particular relation is highlighted to represent the mental association which is made when a term intuitively recalls another term, but they are neither synonyms nor connected by means of a hyperonymy/hyponymy relation.

Pragmatics is the study of how people exchange meanings through the use of language. In this paper we describe our experience with regard to texts belonging to a large contemporary corpus of written language, in order to verify the uses, changes and flexibility of the meaning of Proper Names (PN). As a matter of fact, while building the lexical semantic database ItalWordNet (IWN), a considerable set of PN (up to now, about 4,000) has been inserted and studied. We give prominence to the polysemy of PN and their shifting or moving from one class to another as an example of the extensibility of language and the possibility of change considering meaning as a dynamic process. Many examples of the sense shifting phenomenon can be evidenced by textual corpora. By comparing the percentages regarding the texts belonging to two different periods of time, an increasing use of the PN with sense extension has been verified. This evidence could confirm the tendency to consider the derived or extended senses as more salient and prevailing on the base senses, confirming a “gradual fixation” of meaning during the time. The object of our study (in progress) is to observe the uses of sense extensions also examining in detail “freshly coined” examples and taking into account their relationship with meta representational capacity and human creativity and the ways in which linguistic dynamics can activate the meaning potential of the words.

The users’ demand has determined the need to manage the growing new technical maritime terminology which includes very different domains such as the juridical or commercial ones. A terminological database was built by exploiting the computational tools of ItalWordNet (IWN) and its lexical-semantic model (EuroWordNet).This paper concerns the development of database structure and data coding, relevance of the concepts of ‘term’ and ‘domain’, information potential of the terms, complexity of this domain and detailed ontology structuring recently undertaken and still in progress. Our domain structure is described defining a core set of terms representing the two main sub-domains specified in ‘technical-nautical’ and ‘maritime transport’ terminology. These terms are sufficiently general to be the root nodes of the core ontology we are developing. They are mostly domain-dependent, but the link with the Top Ontology of IWN remains, endorsing either general and ‘foundation’ information, or detailed description directly connected with the specific domain. Through the semantic relations linking the synsets, every term ‘inherits’ the top ontology definitions and becomes itself an integral part of the structure. While codifying a term in the maritime database, the reference is at the same time allowed to the Base Concepts of the terminological ontology embedding the term in the semantic network, showing that upper and core ontologies make it possible for the framework to integrate different views on the same domain in a meaningful way.