CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SEMANTIC AND CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS
OF VOLCANO VERB COLLOCATES WITHIN
THE NATURAL DISASTER DOMAIN:
A FRAME-BASED TERMINOLOGY APPROACH
JOSÉ MANUEL UREÑA GÓMEZ-MORENO
AND MIRIAM BUENDÍA CASTRO
Introduction
Frame-based Terminology (Faber 2009, 2011, 2012) and its practical
application, EcoLexicon, envisage verb collocations in the specialized
domain of the environment in terms of their argument structure (bottom-up
approach) and with the lexical meaning of the verb in mind (top-down
approach). In other words, the meaning of the verb collocation is imposed
by the meaning of the arguments but, at the same time, the verb also
constrains the semantic nature of the arguments that can combine with it.
This paper focuses on the constraints imposed by the verb. To this end, the
causative motion construction of VOLCANO conceptualized as a natural
disaster is described and explored. Empirical evidence from a corpus of
environmental texts shows that although the verbs activated by VOLCANO
in the cause motion construction (e.g. belch, dribble, spew, spit, sputter)
activate the same type of semantic and conceptual information at a generic
level, differences in meaning between these verbs arise because of
constraints imposed by their dictionary definitions, instantiated in specific
terminological usage contexts. It was also found that metaphorical
meaning extensions from general language to specialized language have a
bearing on these constraints.
In the 20th century, most linguistic theories envisaged the study of
verbs from a syntactic perspective (Chomsky 1957). However, over the
years, semantics has gradually acquired a more important role to the extent