Abstract
The theme of this thesis is the 'orientation' of multiple lexical terms and special language verb phrases. Orientation is a necessary step for two main reasons: ascertaining the most logical placing of multiple lexical terms and special language verb phrases (combinants) in a dictionary; providing the most apposite terminological and terminographical background data for a multiple lexical term or phrase, these data being determined by the subject field of the text in which the term or phrase appears. The research has drawn together aspects such as collocation and valency, and analyses of corpora have resulted in the development of a model for special language verb phrases in English and French which it is proposed can be applied and adapted to different specialised subject fields. Past research into special language verb phrases has been sparse and, in contrast to general language, it does not appear that a model pertaining to this construction has been developed previously. Of additional novelty is the application of the model to special language verb phrases in French, because it is hoped that the results will act as a precursor for a dictionary of verb collocations in that language. It is intended that the results of the research will benefit: learners of a foreign language who may become translators, to enable them to seek a term or phrase easily and efficiently; subject specialists who prepare papers in a language which is not their mother tongue; technical writers; pre-editors of texts for machine translation; terminographers who need guidelines for entering compound terms and phrases in: (i) printed dictionaries and (ii) computerised systems such as terminology data banks (term banks). The results are supported by statistical data acquired from the compilation by the author of two special language corpora, one in English and the other in French, of restricted areas of virology and bacteriology.