Podstawy modelowania terminograficznego

The present book is devoted to the theory and practice of constructing models of terminological dictionaries. Creating such type of dictionaries is known to be a complex activity that demands professionalism, constructing terminographic models being one of the obligatory stages of this procedure. There is therefore a need to formulate the basics of terminographic modelling, and the present work is an attempt made to achieve this goal. A modern terminological dictionary has to meet two main requirements. First of all, it has to be a macrosign of knowledge, which means that it has to have a specific structure which should correspond as closely as possible with the conceptual structure of a terminological system that is being described, i.e. above all, it should reflect its onomasiological proportion, as well as various types of semantic relations that occur between its components. As the macrosign of knowledge, the terminological dictionary becomes an element of the system in which it functions together with other macrosigns. Secondly, the terminological dictionary inevitably, so to say, becomes an educational text. It is addressed to homo scientiae, i.e. an educated man who constantly develops their skills and learns new things. They need terminographic products that in an adequate and objective way present the current state of various fields of specialised knowledge. Being the educational text, the dictionary should constitute a semantic continuum, the coherence of which is provided by a system of internal references. Just as any other text, it should have a modular structure that consists elements that correspond to the beginning, the main part and the end. Therefore, the present work introduces the author’s model of an ideal branch terminology dictionary, i.e. a model that can serve as a basis for constructing terminological dictionaries of various fields of specialised knowledge. The issue that is also raised in the work concerns modifications that this model should be subject to, depending on the type of knowledge. In other words, it is about the rules of constructing models of dictionaries of various fields of knowledge that are exemplified by three disciplines: chemistry, physics and geography.