Semantic and Conceptual Aspects of Volcano Verbs 331that today sentence structure is generally studied in light of word meaning
as well as situational context. Consequently, it is our assertion that any
approach to argument structure should take into account both arguments
and predicates or verbs.
Frame-based Terminology (Faber 2009, 2011, 2012) and its practical
application, EcoLexicon, describe verb collocations in the specialized
domain of the environment by analyzing both verbs and their arguments.
As will be seen, the underlying idea is that verbs that share the same kind
of arguments would presumably convey the same kind of meaning.
However, this paper provides evidence that although generalizations
within subdomains can be made, there are always slight differences in verb
meaning because of sense constraints found in dictionary definitions,
instantiated in specialized running texts. These constraints reduce verbs’
capacity for collocation with certain arguments while they prompt co-
occurrence with other arguments. This phenomenon is illustrated in the
present paper with the verb collocates of volcano, conceptualized as a
natural disaster within the EXTREME EVENT. It is also shown that
metaphorical meaning extensions from general language to specialized
language involving verb collocates of volcano have a bearing on the
semantic constraints and ensuing differences in meaning between certain
volcano verbs. This should not come as a surprise since the metaphorical
grounding of terms units has been documented and extensively explored in
a varied number of fields of expertise (e.g. Alexiev 2005 in mining,
geology and civil engineering; Caballero 2006 in architecture; Temmerman
2000, 2006 in genetics; Ureña and Faber 2010, 2011, 2014 and Ureña,
Faber and Buendía 2013 in marine biology).
Frame-based Terminology and EcoLexicon
Frame-based Terminology (Faber 2009, 2011, 2012), henceforth FBT, is a
recent cognitive approach to Terminology, whose basic assumption is that
the configuration of specialized domains is based on events or frames.
Each knowledge area can be said to have its own event template and can
be represented accordingly (Grinev and Klepalchenko 1999).
Frames are a type of cognitive structuring device based on experience
that provide the background knowledge for the words in a language, as
well as the way that those words are used in discourse (Faber and López
2012: 23). Frames have the advantage of making explicit both the
semantic and syntactic behavior of specialized language units, which
necessarily includes a description of conceptual relations as well as a
term’s combinatorial potential (Faber 2009: 123). As such, in order to