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.