Open Access

Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.

Terminological resources play a central role in the organization and retrieval of scientific texts. Both simple keyword lists and advanced modelings of relationships between terminological concepts can make a most valuable contribution to the analysis, classification, and finding of appropriate digital documents, either on the web or within local repositories. This seems especially true for long-established scientific fields with elusive theoretical and historical branches, where the use of terminology within documents from different origins is often far from being consistent. In this paper, we report on the progress of a linguistically motivated project on the onomasiological re-modeling of the terminological resources for the grammatical information system grammis. We present the design principles and the results of their application. In particular, we focus on new features for the authoring backend and discuss how these innovations help to evaluate existing, loosely structured terminological content, as well as to efficiently deal with automatic term extraction. Furthermore, we introduce a transformation to a future SKOS representation. We conclude with a positioning of our resources with regard to the Knowledge Organization discourse and discuss how a highly complex information environment like grammis benefits from the re-designed terminological KOS.

Anhand eines Fallbeispiels wird gezeigt, dass in der praktischen Arbeit des EuGH Rechtsarbeit und Spracharbeit eng miteinander verflochten sind. Wenn es in einem strittigen Fall um die konkrete Ausarbeitung einer haltbaren Sachverhaltsbeschreibung geht, zeigt sich, dass die Rechtsarbeit und die Spracharbeit des Gerichts eigentlich identisch sind. In einem solchen Fall ist es für das Gericht nützlich und günstig, wenn es auf so viele sprachliche Formulierungen (auch in verschiedenen Sprachen) zurückgreifen kann wie möglich. Das Ziel ist, möglichst viele Interpretationen in Betracht zu ziehen, um das Urteil bestandssicher zu machen. In dieser Situation sind Vorschläge, das Sprachenspektrum, in dem der EuGH arbeitet, im Vorhinein und generell einzuschränken, kontraproduktiv.