Léxico generativo y aplicaciones lexicográficas: Los nombres concretos del dominio de la medicina en el DRAE

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the definitions of concrete medical nouns that appear in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, henceforth DRAE), using qualia structure (Pustejovsky, 1995). From a point of view that considers the bidirectionality between theoretical and applied linguistics, we argue that qualia structure is a tool that not only provides with the necessary elements to analyze sense generation, but it provides a heuristic tool that can be used to analyze the degree of systematicity and the adequacy of lexicographical definitions. Furthermore, the qualia structure, the semantic type concept, and the idea of dominant quale allow us to start developing a classification of concrete nouns from a lexicographical analysis, which will improve their lexicographical treatment. Concrete nouns marked as medicina (medicine) or anatomía (anatomy) were automatically extracted from DRAE and were classified according to the UMLS ontology. Then, the definitions were analyzed to determine what qualia structure were present in them and in which way, particularly, what expressions were used to refer to these values, what order was used to express them, and in what part of the definition was used to express them (hypernym or specific difference) From these findings, we argue that qualia structure and the classification of nouns based on their semantic type can contribute to lexicographical systematicity in the concrete medical nouns. © 2013 PUCV, Chile.