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When Terms Disappear from a Specialized Lexicon: A Semi-automatic Investigation into Necrology

1 Introduction Neology and term formation have long been studied in the field of terminology, and are well documented (see for example for the Humbley 2006). But very few studies have focused on the other end of the life cycle of terms, i.e. on 'lexical death' (Grzega 2002), or, as we call it here on necrology. Our assumption is that necrology can be as interesting to study as neology is, and that it can teach us a lot, for instance on the 'terminological turnover' of a specialized lexicon, i.e. on the number of terms which become obsolete over a given period of time, and on how quickly they do so. This, in turn, can prove to be very useful information for professionals in their everyday practice, to teach specialized languages, or to update ontologies and dictionaries. We define necrology as the disappearance of a term, the disappearance of a part of term, a change in grammatical status, and/or the disappearance of a meaning over a given period of time. Neologisms which have failed to stabilize in a lexicon, and have thus disappeared from it are also considered as necrolo-gisms. We also keep in mind that a term can disappear from a specialized lexicon over a given period of time, and is therefore considered, for the period involved, as a necrologism even if it may reappear in the same lexicon at a later time period, with a new or altered meaning. Our objectives for this research are first to identify various linguistic clues that can help detect necrologisms semi-automatically, and explore various computer tools and techniques to extract them from a corpus. Once an initial list of necrologisms has been identified, our aim is then to list the different types of term necrology, and see which ones are the most productive for the corpus studied .