Audiovisual Archives: Digital Text and Discourse Analysis

Chapter 15

The ASW Thesaurus

 

15.1. Introduction

We have already stressed the central role of the thesaurus in the metalinguistic device, ASW, many times. Among other things, its importance lies in the fact that it enables us to maintain the meta-lexicon of conceptual terms* (of objects of analysis* and activities of analysis*) at a fairly high level of generality; to ensure it contains a great many terms, while being able to give an account not only of the referential specificities of the universe of discourse* of this-or-that archive, but also of the viewpoints and therefore the various classifications (the various “olksonomies”) of objects of analysis in a given universe of discourse.

In addition, the thesaurus is an indispensable tool for the procedure of controlled description* which, as we know, constitutes one of the two procedures for the basic description of an audiovisual text or corpus.

Since we have already examined the most important aspects of the ASW thesaurus (in particular, see Chapter 10 as well as sections 11.4 and 14.4), here we shall content ourselves with giving a general overview of its organization and operation.

Section 15.2 reiterates the place and function of the thesaurus in the ASW metalinguistic system.

sections 15.3 gives a more in-depth treatment of a central aspect in the construction and internal function of the ASW thesaurus, which is that of the facets, interpreted here in the sense of a semantic feature – a classeme, to borrow a concept used ...