Defining and Structuring Saussure's Terminology

In the framework of the Italian project 'For a digital edition of Ferdinand de Saussure's manuscripts', an electronic thesaurus of Saussure's terminology is being built, which includes new terms extracted from recently found manuscripts. The lexical model on which it is grounded is a customized version of the SIMPLE model. In this paper, an overview of the customization process is provided, with a special focus on the steps taken for designing a domain-specific ontology as well as on the creation of additional semantic relations and features. Lexical entries are illustrated and the potential of a structured organization of semantic knowledge for gaining a wider understanding of the overall domain terminology is highlighted.