Abstract In this paper, we study how meaning of a polysemous lexical item is distinguished in a terminological research study to account for terms from the field of the environment in Brazilian Portuguese. This research is related to two multilingual terminological resources, the DiCoEnviro — Dictionnaire fondamental de l’environnement — and A framed version of DiCoEnviro, both under the coordination of the Observatoire de Linguistique Sens-Texte (OLST), Université de Montréal, Canada. The focus is on the verb poluir (to pollute), a polysemous lexical item, extracted from a corpus, especially compiled for the research, made up of scientific articles on the topic of pollution. The research draws on the lexicon-driven approach (LDA) encompassing two frameworks, Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) and Frame Semantics (FS). Based on eight methodological steps, the terminological research adopts a specific perspective on the linguistic properties of terms and on the expression of specialized knowledge in semantic frames. The results show two meanings for poluir, poluir 1a and poluir 1b, each meaning presenting a different argument structure, with a different number of arguments and semantic roles, and attributed to different frames, Contamination and CauseContamination respectively.
Flávia Lamberti (Mon,) studied this question.