Textual corpora for the analysis of terminological dependency: challenges and premises

Abstract

The present paper aims to define and the main criteria which must be taken into account in order to build a textual corpus for the study of terminological dependency. After having completed a detailed analysis on the way Spanish depends on English to create neologisms in the field of Alzheimer Disease, (Sánchez Ibáñez, 2013), we propose a set of basic principles and strategies to keep both uniformity and asymmetry as opposite but yet complementary notions along the whole corpus building process, as a first step to keep track of this kind of linguistic subordination between languages. The thematic specificity, the chronological proximity or the genre of texts compiled have turned out to be very useful factors for our purposes. The conclusions we have drawn confirm that an accurate, bilingual corpus, built according to a set of well-defined parameters, is a valid starting point for the study of terminological dependency.