Lexical incompatibilities of verb-noun collocations in German, English and Croatian common language of science and their representation in e-dictionaries of general scientific terms

Authors

  • Mirjana Šnjarić University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33604/sl.14.27.2

Keywords:

general scientific language, transdisciplinary verb noun collocations, Croatian, German, English, language of science, trilingual collocational e-dictionary

Abstract

The paper deals with transdisciplinary verb-noun collocations and their lexical incompatibilities in the German, English, and Croatian common language of science – e.g, Aspekt(e)//Problem(e) herausstellen ‘(to) highlight/emphasize/point out aspects’, ‘istaknuti/naglasiti aspekt(e)//problem(e)’. Contrastive and translation analysis is limited to selected examples of collocations in the German and English common language of science and a comparison with their contrastive correspondents in Croatian as well as the establishment of translation equivalents in the three languages.

One of the aims of the paper is to point out the need to create new types of multilingual and multipurpose electronic dictionaries with improved processing of general scientific verb-noun collocations. The second goal is to shed light on issues related to collocation in this area of language and to propose an improved and more detailed representation of inconsistent collocational patterns in the new trilingual e-dictionary of general scientific language based on confirmations of actual application in the wider syntagmatic environment in the modern corpus of scientific knowledge. Such a syntagmatic environment would depict and describe the type of scientific activity that takes place in collocational verb-noun patterns below the level of the isolated individual functional translation equivalent, and occupies an appropriate place in the structure of a scientific text in the three languages.

The ultimate goal of the first broader research of verb-noun collocations of three languages is to present and make a list of typical and characteristic general scientific collocations with translation equivalents or possible translation solutions, which should finally be described and presented in a new trilingual electronic dictionary of transdisciplinary general scientific terminology of the three languages.

The modern corpus of the Croatian scientific language was used as the source for Croatian verb-noun collocations. The German online dictionary Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS) served as a source of collocation information for the German language, while the online dictionaries Glosbe and Langenscheidt were used as a source for English collocations.

Published

2021-04-19

Issue

Section

Preliminary communication