Documenting Mexican Folk-art Linguistic Heritage: The Application of the Sets Theory to Determine its Common Terminology

Abstract

This article shows the application of an ethnographical method (lexical availability method) and diverse strategies for lexical documentation (documentation of terminology in gray literature and other published documents) to the compilation and validation of the terminology of folk-art in Mexico, a knowledge area with scarcely written tradition. As one can foresee, the result obtained from the lexicon through the different methods and strategies of documentation applied allows registering several terminological lists. From these lists and by determining the intersection of two or more lexical sets, principle obtained from the set theory, one can obtain a group that contains the most frequent elements or the common terminology of a domain. In addition to the above, the article explains how a facets system for the basic organization of this terminology can be created from the lexical documentation obtained.