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Open research questions in linguistics and terminology studies

34 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,868 linguistics and terminology studies papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Conclusions and perspectives human translation is notable for its high level of consistency in the use of human translation is notable for its high level of consistenc A human translation is notable for its high level of consistenc established Ukrainian economic terminology, a deep understanding of the context, established Ukrainian economic terminology, a deep understanding of the context, established Ukrainian economic terminology, a deep understanding of the context, and the varied application of translation strategies. In contrast, NMT tends towards and the varied application of translation strategies. In contrast, NMT tends towards and the varied application of translation strategies. In contrast, NMT tends towards calquing and literalism. Depending on the context, this can lead to the emergence calquing and literalism. Depending on the context, this can lead to the em calquing and literalism. Depending on the context, this can lead to the em of stylistically incorrect but comprehensible equivalents, or to serious distortions of of stylistically incorrect but comprehensible equivalents, or to serious distortions of of stylistically incorrect but comprehensible equivalents, or to serious distortions of meaning.

    Adequacy of Economic Terminology Translation. The Advantage of Human Translation over Machine Translation? · 2026 · DOI

  • The theoretical framework of our study perceived the way of viewing lexicalsemantic fields as groupings that are organised with structural hierarchy, semantic relations between the constituents of the field, and mental models that manifest knowledge and attitudes towards social phenomena within the studied domain and categorise the real-world entities across different levels of cognition. The hierarchical structure of the lexical-semantic groups consists of the nucleus (core) of the field which is represented by dominant nuclear (core) verbalisers that define the semantic and conceptual boundaries of the domain; the perinuclear zone that is constituted by lexical items that share some common semantic features and are further organised 80 Studia Philologica. 2026. Issue 26 DOI: https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2491.2026.26 ISSN 2412-2491 (Online) into smaller lexical-thematic groups that deeper explain the domain; and the periphery that consists of lexical items that are the farthest from the nucleus and have the lowest level of semantic proximity. The study considered lexical-semantic fields context-dependent, i.e., varying depending on the type of context they unfold within. Thus, to apply critical discourse analysis, the study accommodated the sociosemiotic view of the discourse in order to perceive it as a special social practice that shapes ideological and cultural attitudes and provides communicative guidelines. Hence, the mentioned theoretical framework motivated the choice of a mixedmethods approach, where content-analysis was viewed as an "umbrella term" encompassing both lexical-semantic field modeling for unfolding the quantitative dimension of the study subject and critical discourse analysis to quantitatively express how the lexical-semantic field of "Migration" in the contemporary British news discourse shapes sentiment towards the studied phenomenon. The collected linguistic materials, which were referred to as tokens, were stratified into their corresponding zone inside the field by applying a frequency-based model. The lexical-semantic field "Migration" modeling gave insights into the hierarchical structure. Overall, the nucleus is represented by the cluster of words denoting migration, temporary residence, and core participants of the event. The perinuclear zone is mostly represented by lexical items that denote means of transport, statistical discourse markers, and legal-administrative framework.

    Lexical-semantic Field "Migration" in Contemporary British News Discourse: Semantic and Quantitative Dimensions through Critical Discourse Analysis · 2026 · DOI

  • UZ-Ijtimoiy-gumanitar fanlarning dolzarb muammolari № S/5 (6) – 2026 Future research may focus on the comparative analysis of digital business discourse, corporate communication on social media platforms, business negotiations, and emerging linguistic trends in international professional communication.

    COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC MEANS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK BUSINESS DISCOURSE · 2026 · DOI

  • The point of departure is the claim that in the scholarly tradition the notion of phraseological meaning is often limited to a general definition and a set of isolated features, without a developed structural model, whereas paremiological meaning (the semantics of proverbs as sentential formulae) is not analysed in terms of component organisation at all.

    A Componential Model of Phraseological and Proverbial Meaning (Based on Czech Language Data) · 2026 · DOI

  • Based on the findings of this SR/MA, several recommendations can be proposed for researchers, policymakers, educators, and AI developers who are interested in Arabic–English transliteration. First, linguists and transliteration researchers can develop cross-regional comparative studies to determine whether the error patterns identified in this corpus hold across different Arab countries, dialects, and sociolinguistic contexts. They can expand transliteration research to include longitudinal datasets, enabling the tracking of changes in spelling practices over time, especially in digital environments. Policymakers and public-signage authorities should establish standardized transliteration guidelines for shop names, street signs, and public institutions to reduce inconsistency and improve readability for residents and visitors. They should implement quality-control mechanisms for commercial signage, ensuring that transliteration is linguistically accurate and culturally appropriate and encourage municipalities to collaborate with linguists when approving new signage or branding materials. Educators and language practitioners should integrate transliteration awareness into EFL and Arabic-as-a- foreign-language curricula, helping learners understand the structural differences between the two writing systems; provide training on common transliteration pitfalls, especially for teachers, translators, and editors who regularly handle bilingual texts; and develop teaching materials that illustrate how transliteration choices affect meaning, identity, and cross-cultural communication. AI Developers and NLP Researchers can improve AI transliteration systems by incorporating linguistically informed rules for Arabic phonology, gemination, pharyngeal fricative consonants, and morphological boundaries. They can curate cleaner, standardized training datasets to prevent AI models from reproducing human inconsistencies found in social-media and signage data. They can evaluate AI transliteration performance across dialects, phoneme classes, and morphological structures, ensuring that systems do Page | 11 Arabic–English Transliteration of Personal Names and Public Signages: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis not disproportionately misrepresent certain linguistic features. They may develop hybrid transliteration models that combine machine learning with rule-based constraints to enhance accuracy and reduce bias. For cross-script identity and documentation systems, universities, immigration offices, medical systems should be encouraged to adopt consistent transliteration policies for personal names to reduce administrative confusion and identity fragmentation and provide individuals with guidance on stable name spellings, especially for official documents, academic publications, and digital profiles. For Future Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, SR/MA research should be expanded to include multi-author corpora, enabling broader generalization beyond a single research program; incorporate external validation datasets, such as governmental transliteration guidelines or international naming standards; and explore transliteration across additional language pairs (Arabic– French, Arabic–Turkish, Arabic–Urdu) to build a comparative typology of cross-script behavior.

    Arabic–English Transliteration of Personal Names and Public Signages: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis · 2026 · DOI

  • Given the pivotal role of terminology in the development of techno-scientific terminology in Shona and, by extension, in the empowerment of African languages in knowledge production, the following recommendations are proposed. • • If Shona and other African languages are to participate fully in domains such as science, technology, engineering, law and medicine, there must be a sustained commitment to the creation of specialised terminologies and dictionaries. This includes not only biomedical glossaries but also lexicons that encompass ICT, agriculture, engineering and legal discourse. Without these resources, the vision of mother-tongue-based education and linguistic sovereignty will remain a rhetorical ideal rather than a practical reality. It is imperative to revise and implement robust language policies that prioritise the use of indigenous languages in all spheres of life: education, administration, media and the legal system. Vague or superficial policy statements are not enough. Language policy must be backed by tangible institutional frameworks and incentives that empower translators, linguists and terminologists to innovate within their languages. • The current Shona orthography is ill equipped to accommodate the phonological demands of scientific and technical terms. Evidence from this study confirms that the orthographic system fails to capture several phonemes required for accurate transliteration and representation. It is, therefore, necessary to expand the Shona alphabet to include graphemes such as <th>, <ph>, <kh>, <rh> and the consonant <l>. This phonological expansion must be rooted in rigorous linguistic analysis of the sound system of Shona, to ensure that orthographic reform aligns with natural speech patterns rather than with foreign orthographic conventions. 2026 (8): 36-38 36 https://doi.org/10.38140/jtsa.v8i.9829 Journal for Translation Studies in Africa 2026 (8) Chirimaunga Term creation strategies in a specialised Shona dictionary: A linguistic analysis • Zimbabwe urgently needs a centralised and authoritative terminology board that is tasked with coordinating the development, validation, standardisation and dissemination of new terms in Shona and other indigenous languages. This board should operate under the aegis of the National Language Institute and work collaboratively with universities, professional translators and terminologists, domain experts and community representatives. It must develop a strategic outreach programme to familiarise the public with newly coined terms to foster usage and acceptance. • Developing discipline-specific and general scientific dictionaries in Shona is no longer optional – it is essential.

    The Term creation strategies in a specialised Shona dictionary: A linguistic analysis · 2026 · DOI

  • Although the educational terminology database is being developed by a group of international scholars, the present article focused only on examples from the Ukrainian context. More parallels should be drawn between the educational systems of those countries in the Carpathian Basin where Hungarian minority speakers have traditionally lived in the last one hundred years. In addition, since the database is far from complete, this study should be regarded as a brief insight into the importance of translating terms related to education in the context of minority groups.

    Building a Cross-Border Educational Terminology Database: The Case of Hungary and Ukraine · 2026 · DOI

  • Drawing on six complementary strategies — literature review, machine translation, parallel corpora, human translation, bootstrapping, and generative artificial intelligence — the study identified and validated 110 distinct English hyponymic patterns, many of which had not been previously documented.

    Discovering hyponymic knowledge patterns in English · 2025 · DOI

  • To overcome this difficulty, which is detrimental to the quality of translation studies, the author proposes to abandon the use of the term omission to designate a translation procedure and to use effacement (deletion) as a hyperonym for implicitation, deletion of heterolingualism and other procedures that remain to be identified or validat éd.

    L’omission et ses avatars · 2023 · DOI

  • Locating Polish texts related to forgery, car trafficking or firearms trafficking were much more rare and their number was insufficient for composing an adequate subcorpora.

    Domain linguistics resources for discovering criminal activities in Polish texts · 2026 · DOI

  • Consequently, users who are insufficiently aware of these limitations (or lack the requisite competence to assess them), risk accepting flawed or misleading interpretations as accurate.

    Educational Implications of Lexicographic Misalignment · 2026 · DOI

  • The database serves as the first systematic representation of English words in Croatian and provides an indispensable tool for further research into the phenomenon while at the same time opening the door to a new line of research – cognitive processing of English words in Croatian.

    Putting languages into perspective: A comprehensive database of English words and their Croatian equivalents · 2024 · DOI

  • This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, increase and rise, by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students.

    Is it ‘Increase’ or ‘Rise?’ A Corpus-based Behavioural Profile Study of English Near-Synonym Verbs · 2023 · DOI

  • The scientific novelty of the article is that, despite the significant achievements of domestic and foreign linguistics in the study of English adjectives of dimension, the problem of their field semantics with a fairly wide range of lexical compatibility still remains insufficiently studied.

    Peculiarities of use and methods of translation of english adjectives of dimension to denote the general small size (based on the films of the BBC channel “The Blue Planet” and “Life”) · 2021 · DOI

  • Originality/Value: The changes of Incoterms have been investigated from legal, risk management, and logistical points of view but there is still now a gap in the research of Incoterms concerning the terminological perspective.

    International Chamber of Commerce Rules for Trade Terms - The Terminological Approach · 2021 · DOI

  • Abstract Dried meats is an area that has not been widely studied from a terminological approach despite the growing need of Spanish companies to adapt data about their products into English to export their goods abroad.

    e-DriMe · 2021 · DOI

  • There has been no agreement whether a lexical concept adjustment can be regarded as a primary (necessary) or a secondary (optional) pragmatic process.

    Lexical Concept Adjustment in Mechanical Engineering Discourse · 2019 · DOI

  • translating bilingual dictionary articles, requires skills that, to the best of our knowledge, have not been described in the lexicographic literature.

    Translating English Specialized Dictionary Articles into Danish and Spanish: Some Reflections · 2018 · DOI

  • Further study of the word-building concept should be continued, in our opinion, by involving other groups of word-building units, including complex ones, which will clarify the proposed definition of word-building concept and establish clear criteria for the separation of word-building concepts.

    Word-building concept of German suffixal nouns with metonymical component · 2018 · DOI

  • While the conclusions of this paper refer solely to the analyzed corpus and not to the two languages in general, they are a good starting point for further research into Croatian and Slovenian term formation strategies in the marketing and other domains.

    A corpus-based analysis of Croatian and Slovenian term formation in the marketing domain · 2017 · DOI

  • Originality/value – The issue of multilinguality in organizations, a possible cause of a weak penetration in the global world, has been scarcely studied and hardly tackled from a methodological perspective.

    Managing multilinguality in organizations · 2013 · DOI

  • Although visuals have been co-deployed with text in specialized dictionaries as far back as the European Renaissance, the interaction of both representational modalities is relatively under-researched.

    The interaction of text and visual in specialized dictionary definitions · 2013 · DOI

  • Though several investigations have dealt with the status of borrowed morphemes in Japanese terminologies, the status of borrowed morphemes within the structure of terminologies has not been fully addressed so far.

    Analysing the status of borrowed morphemes in terminological structure · 2010 · DOI

  • Where the Australian delegate says that the sitiiation needs to be investigated, the Soviet delegate says that the question is already decided.

    Semantic snares in International communication · 1965 · DOI

  • Historical research will undoubtedly clarify many of these problems, although a complete analysis is hardly to be hoped for now, in view of the disappearance of many aboriginal tongues and our very limited knowledge of their historical develop ment.

    NOUN‐CLASSIFICATION IN AUSTRALIAN AND BANTU: FORMAL OR SEMANTIC? · 1954 · DOI

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34 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 1,868 linguistics and terminology studies papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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