Evaluation of Felber and Langacker’s Approach in Conceptual Classification of Content Words of Moein Persian Dictionary

Abstract

The classification of words for organization and easy access to their various dimensions, as well as the aggregation of information, is one of the topics that has long been the focus of attention of researchers in the field of conceptoloy and terminology. This research has two objectives. First, to classify a selection of content words in Moein Dictionary based on the approaches of Felber (1984) and Langacker (2008, 2013), in order to examine the capability and efficiency of approaches in classifying the general words of dictionary, as well as the possibility of combining the approaches and achieving a more comprehensive paradigm. Second, to identify and categorize the underlying concepts of the entries extracted from dictionary via conceptology, and compare the advantages and disadvantages with the classifications of Felber and Langacker. The data includes 990 content words extracted from the Moein dictionary, by the random sampling method. The results of the study show that Felber and Langacker’s classifications and the combination do not possess the essential efficiency to classify all words in the dictionary. Thus, the solution found in the conceptology of lexical entries, as a result of which 45 concepts were identified and presented as a unified model.

Keywords

• conceptology
• terminology
• intrinsic characteristics
• extrinsic characteristics
• lexicography