ABSTRACT: This panel will illustrate the complementarity of Semantics and Onomantics as contrasting paradigms needed in the identification and designation of the important concepts needed by social scientists. The Semantic framework is widely familiar and easily available, but the Onomantic approach is equally important and virtually unknown. The projects to be described by their organizers illustrate these approaches and how they can support each other. Discussion will focus on appropriate ways and means to facilitate cooperation by means of the World Wide Web and hypertext links that are able to facilitate integration of data so that users can benefit from all the relevant methodologies, both semantic and onomantic, as they are needed to cope with increasingly serious communications problems of a rapidly globalizing world. Comments about how this can be accomplished are offered below.

Chair: Fred W. Riggs

Papers:

Matti Malkia and Fred Riggs: The INTERCOCTA Project: Ethnicity and Globalization See Concepts

Ted Lowi and Mauro Calise: The Hyperpolitics Project [Note: this project will be explained at another panel ]

Else Oyen: The CROP Project on "Poverty" [Note: this project will be explained at another panel] For details see: CROP home page.

Paul Pelowski: The HASSET Project: A Social Science Thesaurus Details can be found at Home Page

PARTICIPANTS:

Mauro CALISE (Univ Naples, Italy)

Theodore LOWI, President, International Political Science Association, Dept of Politics, Univ College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin4, Irlanda
E-mail (at home): <tjl7@cornell.edu>,

Matti MALKIA , University of Tampere, Dept of Administrative Science, P.O.Box 607, FIN-33101 TAMPERE, Finland
Telex 22263 tayk sf; Tel. +358-40-504-2498 (mobile phone) Fax +358-3-215-6020; Tel. +358-3-215-6362; Email: <malkia@uta.fi> Web Page ; Home Page for INTERCOCTA

Else OYEN Professor, President, International Social Science Council, Chair of CROP, The Comparative Research Programme on Poverty Health and Social Policy Studies, University of Bergen, Fosswinckelsgate 7, N-5007 Bergen, Norway
Fax: (47) 5558-9745; Tel: (47) 5558-9740; E-mail<else.oyen@helsos.uib.no> CROP PAGE.

Paul PELOWSKI, Thesaurus Project Leader, The Data Archive, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
Telephone: 01206 874037 Fax: 01206 872003; email: <paulp@essex.ac.uk>; Web Page: HASSET PAGE

Fred W. RIGGS, Political Science Department, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822.
Tel: 808 956-8123; Fax: 808 956-6877; e-mail: <fredr@hawaii.edu>; Home Page

COMMENTS: The Cyberspace revolution now permits hypertext jumps between texts in different documents and between segments of the same document, in a global network open to anyone with a computer and access to the internet. This technological break-through has fantastic implications for conceptual and terminological analysis, and especially for linking Semantic and Onomantic data. It permits a variety of systems, some basically semantic in orientation and others essentially onomantic, to be linked to each other to support their complementarity, something that was quite difficult to do by means of the technologies available before the computer revolution. For a more detailed discussion of this transformation, take a look at the segment on Cyberspace in the COCTA report.

Three Onomantic Examples. The onomantic perspective is demonstrated in the work of the INTERCOCTA project. Three such projects will be described here -- an explanation of Onomantics is offered at the end of this commentary. The first of these onomantic projects was created as a basis for the COCTA Roundtable on globalization, chaired by Henry Teune, to be conducted at the Montreal ISA Congress.

To collect the relevant data for this project, questionnaire was sent to all members of the International Sociological Association inviting those who had written and published scholarly work about globalization to submit brief texts explaining what they meant by this word and illustrating their usage. Respondents were subscribed to an e-mail list called GLOBE-L and their Texts were posted in a Web file. By integrating the list with this page, it was possible to sustain a continuing discourse designed to identify, clarify, and revise the concepts used by these scholars. A synthesis of the concepts represented in these texts was prepared. In many cases no unambiguous term for the intended concept had been established, leading to suggestions for phrases and neologisms that might be used. This process illustrates the Onomantic method. Everyone involved is, of course, encouraged to propose preferable terms -- thus all the new items in the project are viewed as tentative suggestions. Some comments on how data such as that produced by the globalization project should be interpreted and used is contained in a final commentary prepared for participants in the roundtable.

The identification and naming of concepts is assuredly not an end in itself. Rather, its goal is to provide tools for use in theoretically significant contexts. For some examples of how global analysis can help us understand and deal with the world in which we live, readers are invited to visit three research notes by the organizer of this panel: Globalization and Social Science ; Globalization and Area Studies ; and Globalization and Governance In each of these texts one can see how a concept involving the rapid evolution on a planetary scale of increasingly intensive interdependence among human beings has been used to help us understand the contemporary need for radical changes in social science disciplines, area studies, and governance. Since more than one of the concepts involved in globalization was needed in these notes, they provide examples of the utilization of concepts and terms developed through this project. Incidentally, the word, globalization, is itself a new term. Webster's unabridged 1979 dictionary does not enter it, and my 1996 edition of Webster's Encyclopedic dictionary enters it only as a possible word-form under globalize, a word defined as expanding the world market for a product. By now this neologism is widely used for many other concepts, reflecting rapid changes that are now affecting the whole planet. No doubt future dictionaries will have separate entries for it and several definitions for its various new meanings.

Since the Globalization project is still under construction, readers may want to see some data that has already been analyzed and classified for more convenient utilization. It can be found in an earlier mini-project created on the basis of a single paper. This a micro-level exercise paved the way for the more ambitious globalization project. Its data consists of a set of concepts used in a single paper on contemporary ethnonational conflict called Turmoil Among Nations These concepts are described in a set of records which are indexed by means of a Classification scheme as well as an alphabetical list . The same methodology is now available for application to the concepts discovered through the Globalization project. A reference tool helpful to anyone writing on this globally important contemporary process will soon become freely available to everyone on the Web.

Another project in the domain of Ethnicity involved using an interdisciplinary set of four papers on Ethnic Nationalism that were presented at a recent conference of the International Studies Association. Key terms found in these papers were identified and defined on the basis of their apparent meaning in their contexts of use. Not surprisingly, the writers often had different concepts in mind when using the same word and also, sometimes, they used different terms for the same concept. By arranging the terms alphabetically, it became possible to clarify these differences of usage. Putting them together in a single alphabetical Glossary provides a foundation for the subsequent development of a systematically arranged conceptual index that will make this material more readily accessible. This project involves only four papers rather than the larger number of texts used in the Globalization project, it covers a broad range of concepts rather than a narrowly focused set. These three projects were all carried out in the context of a methodology for conceptual and terminological analysis that has evolved under the auspices of COCTA through the INTERCOCTA project of the International Social Science Council and UNESCO.

The Semantic Orientation. By contrast with the onomantic approach illustrated in these INTERCOCTA projects, the other projects described in this panel reflect different semantic approaches. Of course, the most familiar type of semantic project is everywhere available in the form of dictionaries. They enable readers to locate words in alphabetical order and find their definitions. The World Wide Web now expedites this process by offering hypertext dictionaries that enable users not only to find individual entry words, but to jump quickly to related terms and concepts. A basic example can be found at the Meriam-Webster Dictionary which offers hypertext links between its entries.

Users of this resource are reminded of an important point often neglected by readers of a printed dictionary. This point is each entry word is just a lexical unit, not a concept. Indeed, most words represent more than one concept. These concepts are defined separately in numbered sub-entries

-- for example, the entry for bridge defines more than a score of concepts, including "1.a structure for crossing a river; 2.a transitional phase; 3.part of a ship; 4.a tooth replacement; etc. It is an error to think that such words have a single meaning that can be imagined by combining all the concepts it can represent. This point is dramatically illustrated by the Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus.

Here readers will find links from each concept (sense) of a word to its synonyms and their definitions, e.g., from each meaning of bridge to relevant texts. A very sophisticated hypertext elaboration of the semantic approach can be found in a Hypertext Webster Gateway Dictionary that includes links key word used in its definitions. Structurally, these words provide clues to broader, narrower and related terms.

Incidentally, different words often have the same form which is reflected in dictionaries by offering a separate entry for each such homonym -- superscripts on each word distinguish them from each other. Thus bridge¹ (mentioned above) is a different word from bridge², the word used to refer to a kind of card game. Such homonyms are identified etymologically, by their separate origins, rather than semantically, by their different meanings. The significance of this information will become apparent later when speaking about the onomantic problem of finding suitable words to represent new concepts.

Text Analysis. A great deal of semantic discussion about how words are used can be found in texts that deal with selected problems. A great context for such texts exists in UNESCO's MOST project which will be the subject of a Special Session at the ISA Montreal Congress, chaired by Ali Kazancigil: see the MOST project. For complete information about this project, go to the MOST Home Page. In order to enhance communication on pressing contemporary problems, we need to develop the relevant concepts and terms. Although the substantive focus for MOST includes ethnicity, the project has so far only supported work on terms used in research on cities, as reported in the files on City Words . The opening message at this site contains this paragraph:

Words take on meaning only when they are actually used in the context of discourses that may carry many different intentions. Sometimes language aims at rationally organizing urban space from above, sometimes words and meanings are adapted to specific situations and interactions. At any moment and place, a variety of language registers are being used in government, science, or the daily life of various urban groups. Many words are thus in competition and all contribute, however unequally, to some "common" language that is used for describing and understanding cities.

This is essentially a semantic project which seeks to identify key words used to talk about cities and their problems in a retrospective framework. Should it not be supplemented by an onomantic project to help develop the concepts and terms needed today to discuss current and future urban problems? The relevant point here is that such projects provide an excellent starting point for more future-oriented work.

Technical Dictionaries. Consider, next, that social scientists have stipulated many specialized meanings for the words entered in ordinary dictionaries. These concepts are often not defined in these dictionaries, a fact that has led to the preparation of a large number of technical dictionaries intended for use within specialized subject fields, including all the social sciences and also many hybrid fields that link them. The HYPERPOLITICS project organized by Ted Lowi and Mauro Calise, which will be described on this panel, began by examining many such dictionaries and extracting definitions from them for analysis and systematization. Although the results are not yet available on the WWW, the compilers intend to make them available in hypertext in the near future. When the project becomes operational, it should become possible to find and compare the technical definitions for key words like ethnicity and globalization as they appear in many specialized social science dictionaries. The basic paradigm in his project is semantic. However, it also opens the door to onomantic analysis when one finds that different definitions of the same term identify more than one concept. If each of these defined concepts is significant, it may be important to be able to distinguish between them by means of unambiguous terms. Although such concepts are not new, they lack unambiguous designators since the words used to represent them have other important meanings that may prove confusing in the texts where these words are used. Whenever this is true, the onomantic approach to finding new terms is needed.

The Thesaurus Paradigm. A reverse problem occurs when many different words are used to represent the same concept. This condition results from the ambiguity of words that have multiple meanings. Such ambiguity is often due to someone's effort to disambiguate references to a concept by stipulating the use of another familiar word as a preferable synonym for a word already in use. In specialized dictionaries, a reader's attention may be called by cross references to the existence of two or more words that can represent the same concept. In some contexts, no doubt, having synonyms for one concept is convenient for literary reasons -- it reduces the monotony of having to repeat the same word. However, there are contexts where it is quite inconvenient to shuttle back and forth between different words that have the same meaning.

This is notably true for indexers who need to agree on one word for each concept. Without such an agreement, users have to hunt around in various parts of an index to find references to material on a single topic. Should one, for example, treat influence, authority, and prestige as different concepts, or view them as synonyms? If the latter, users would be advised that one of these words should be used instead of the others. Other illustrations might be material, corporeal, phenomenal, sensible, and objective, or pull, draft, draw, haul, tug and tow. To help indexers reach agreement on such questions, information specialists have developed indexing languages which are set forth in a thesaurus.

Unlike the familiar Roget's Thesaurus, these are not compilations of synonyms, although they do offer cross-references to guide users from words to be avoided to those that should be used instead. Incidentally, the use of thesaurus to identify a book containing an indexing language involves a stipulated new meaning for an old word. I doubt that you will find it in any ordinary dictionary -- even the Wordsmyth Dictionary-Thesaurus lacked a definition for the indexing sense of this word, but I did find it in one of the three computerized dictionaries cited above. Nevertheless, information specialists assume that everyone knows what they mean by a "thesaurus," creating a puzzle for laymen who normally assume it refers to a work containing sets of synonyms.

The third project described on this panel concerns a "thesaurus" in the indexing language sense. It contains many of the terms used by social scientists, made available by hypertext in several types of relationships. Rather than explain this any more, readers are invited to take a look at the HASSET Thesaurus This project uniquely combines the special language terms of many social sciences into a single master work that makes superb use of hypertext capabilities to support locating linkages between terms. Consulting this resource by hypertext will enable readers and writers to discover the established terms for existing concepts in contextual, hierarchical and other relationships. Innovative scholars will also find this tool especially helpful when they imagine they need a new concept -- it will help them discover whether or not existing terms for any particular concept already exist. A thesaurus is also useful to help discover links or relationships between existing concepts, but it presupposes familiarity with the semantic import of words.

Thesauruses are neither semantic nor onomantic products because they do not provide definitions or descriptions of concepts -- they are simply word lists. Admittedly they may contain scope notes, but these, according to HASSET, are simply brief texts that "give background information on the use and source of the term and explain its nuances of meaning within the thesaurus."

Normally, each term (i.e., a phrase or word) found in a thesaurus is presumed to have one meaning that can be understood by users without the support of a definition. Nevertheless, a thesaurus can also provide support for anyone concerned with conceptual and terminological problems, at both the semantic and onomantic levels.

First, at the onomantic level, a thesaurus can be helpful by identifying words that are not included. If we assume that the HASSET thesaurus lists all the terms used by social scientists for specialized concepts, then we may infer that words which do not appear on this list have not been given a technical meaning by social scientists. Knowing this is important whenever we want to use a familiar word for a new specialized concept. Computer specialists readily understand that using mouse for a gadget is unambiguous even though the word already means a kind of rodent. By contrast, were I to stipulate a new meaning for power, knowing that it already has specialized meanings in social science, I would create ambiguity because it would be more difficult for readers to know which of the concepts that can be designated by power I happen to have in mind when using this word.

Imagine, now, that I want to use a familiar word for a new concept but do not know whether or not it already has a specialized social science meaning. I see by consulting HASSET, that shelter is not used for any social science concept, although it does appear in such phrases as "sheltered employment" and "sheltered housing." My dictionary shows that it is ordinarily used to refer to a protective covering, such as a roof or a fortress. Knowing this, I feel free to stipulate a new meaning for this word without fear that it already has a technical meaning for scholars that will cause ambiguity. No dictionary can give me this knowledge because, as noted above, ordinary dictionaries usually ignore most technical meanings of a word, and technical dictionaries only cover one discipline or field of knowledge, not all of them.

I shall now propose the use of shelter to refer to a type of word like poverty, which is the focus of the CROP project to be explained in our panel. My Webster's Unabridged dictionary defines four different concepts in the entry for this word. Only the first of the four is relevant for the purposes of the CROP project. It reads: the condition or quality of being poor; need; indigence; lack of means of subsistence. This definition helps one understand the intended concept in general terms. However, when it is applied in a wide range of societies and economies, it becomes difficult to draw clear lines between those who are poor and those who are not. Moreover, sociologists, economists, political scientists and anthropologists have quite different ways of operationalizing the concept.

An in-depth examination of all the technical concepts for which a familiar word may be used reveals a stunning proliferation of sheltered concepts. As explained here, in a paper to be delivered in another COCTA-sponsored session at the Montreal ISA Congress, any familiar word in one of its dictionary-defined senses can shelter a substantial array of related and more precisely defined concepts.

The glossary of the CROP project, which is now nearing completion, establishes many of these specialized concepts of poverty and illustrates the results that can be obtained by using a conceptual shelter. In combination, by hypertext, with the resources for conceptual and terminological analysis discussed above, it should be extremely helpful to be able to jump back and forth between them and any glossary that amplifies on the many meanings of a shelter term like poverty. Ultimately, such a glossary will prove invaluable for researchers in this field, helping them to identify their shared themes and problems. It can also be used to compile a thesaurus for the field which could be put to immediate use, for example, by enabling participants to use one term for each subject rather than the "key words" which they now have to use. Such words are often different synonyms for closely related concepts and conceal rather than clarify similarities and differences in research interests.

The Semantics/Onomantics Complex. To complete this background document, it may be helpful to provide a more formal statement about the essential goals and methods of both Semantics and Onomantics. All social science knowledge relies on texts which formulate theories, observations, forecasts and recommendations, the substance of any systematic knowledge. The basic building blocks of all such texts are words that can have a multiplicity of meanings. Normally, in context, we know which of these meanings is intended, but as the world changes -- and the pace of contemporary globalization is producing gigantic changes that profoundly affect our lives -- we need new and more precise concepts that cannot easily be represented by familiar terms and compel us to innovate.

The first and only familiar mode of analysis of the words found in our texts is semantic. It depends on a branch of linguistic knowledge that enables us to investigate the many meanings of words. As represented in dictionary definitions, Semantics helps us understand what the words found in any given text may mean, using the tools on paper and the WWW that were discussed above. It is scarcely necessary to say anything more about this approach because it is widely known and has produced many easily available reference tools.

The complementary approach found in Onomantics reverses this paradigm. Instead of investigating the meanings of a word, it starts by describing a concept and launching a hunt for suitable terms to represent it. Normal inquiry based on familiar problems can be accomplished without Onomantics because all the concepts and terms that are required are already available. However, in our rapidly changing world, we need many new concepts. If a concept is really new, there cannot be any word for it -- all existing words already have meanings. Consequently such words can represent new concepts only when new meanings are added to those it already attached to them. The examples of mouse, shelter, and thesaurus mentioned above provide are illustrative.

This process of finding a way to designate a new concept reverses the familiar semantic paradigm -- it requires that we first identify concepts by describing them and then propose new terms to represent them. Actually, terminological innovation happens all the time, but the basic onomantic principles needed to guide this practice are not familiar and need to be learned. They have been developed under the auspices of the INTERCOCTA project, and are well illustrated by the examples discussed above.

Some comments and links to sources providing more details can be offered here. First, although these needed to represent a new concept may well be neologisms, they may also be phrases composed of familiar words. Provided the context clearly shows that a word is being used for a new concept, even old words can be used unambiguously. As noted above, such terms are confusing when they already have closely related specialized meanings, but when they are borrowed from ordinary language and lack special meanings, it is safe to stipulate a new technical meaning for them. Thus, it is practical to add social science meanings to words like mouse and shelter but impractical to add new meanings to power, poverty, or party.

Another example is provided by the process which led to the coining of Onomantics. Shortly after the COCTA project was launched, it became apparent that we needed to invert the familiar semantic model, to look at how new concepts can be named in addition to studying the established meanings of familiar words. One possibility was to call it the Naming approach. However, we learned that "naming" usually applies to the assignment of names to individuals rather than to abstract concepts, so this was quickly rejected. Then we thought of ana-semantic, a rather good proposal because it emphasizes the antinomy between looking at what words mean and choosing an appropriate word to mean something new. However, subsequently we learned about onomasiology, an established term that linguists use to refer to the process of finding names for anything. Then we learned that there is a subfield of Onomasiology that is called Onomastics --it refers to the process of naming individual objects -- persons, places, .organizations, objects. It occurred to us then that we might coin Onomantics as an antonym for Semantics. It would be easy to remember and has a nearly transparent etymology.

It is impractical to offer a fuller discussion of the onomantic approach here, but pretty complete documentation is available with a mouse-click. The earliest explanation can be found at the Introduction to Onomantics a discussion prepared by the author in 1985. A more recent and comprehensive discourse on the approach can be found at Onomantics and Terminology. More information can also be found on the INTERCOCTA panels sponsored by COCTA at the Montreal Congress -- they are listed at ISA Research Committees For assessment of the development of the onomantic approach under the INTERCOCTA project take a look at this report.

As illustrated by the panel on projects described above, Onomantics is not a replacement for Semantics -- rather, it is a supplementary approach that, by reversing the basic paradigm, offers help to those who want to introduce new concepts or clarify their intentions when familiar words become loaded with different concepts that are all needed. For ordinary usage, when words have well established meanings and can be used unambiguously, the Semantic approach is still needed and many of its tools, as identified above, will prove extremely helpful.

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See linked pages: [] Globalization Roundtable || Commentary and Agenda || Globalization Concepts
See also COCTA Report || Onomantics || Turmoil among Nations Project
Glossary for Ethnonationalism Project []

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Updated: 22 June 1998

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