Semantic and Conceptual Aspects of Volcano Verbs 335In FBT and EcoLexicon, verb collocations refer to highly frequent
combinations of two or more words (Siepmann 2005: 417). These
multiword expressions follow a noun + verb or verb + noun pattern, where
the noun is the base and the verb is the collocate. In this noun-centered
type of collocation, it is our assertion that the meaning of the collocate (the
verb) is imposed by the meaning of the base (the noun), but at the same
time, the collocate also constrains the semantic nature of the arguments
that can combine with it. For example, as shall be seen, in the collocation
the volcano expels, volcano takes a verb designating something being
forced out of it (e.g. expel). However, it is also true that expel only
combines with noun phrases designating something being forced out of a
mouth or a mouth-like orifice (e.g. volcano, in which the crater is
considered to be the mouth in a metaphoric sense; see section 3 for
details). Consequently, co-selection makes such collocations partially
compositional, since base and collocate retain their meaning to a certain
extent (Buendía, Montero and Faber 2014: 73).
Verb collocations are extracted directly from the specialized corpus
compiled within the research group Lexicon. The English subcorpus
currently contains about 40,000,000 tokens. For this specific case, the term
volcano was searched in the corpus and their verb collocates were extracted
together with their concordances. The total number of concordances
retrieved in our corpus were analyzed with a view to identifying the
arguments of each verb. These arguments were then assigned a semantic
category. The semantic categories identified for the specialized field of
natural disasters are the following: NATURAL DISASTER, ATMOSPHERIC
AGENT, WATER AGENT, ATMOSPHERIC CONDITION, MATERIAL ENTITY,
AREA, CONSTRUCTION, ENERGY, HUMAN BEING, LANDFORM, WATER
COURSE, DEATH, DAMAGE, LOSS OF LIFE/PROPERTY, PLANT,^ and EXPLOSIVE^
(Buendía, Montero and Faber 2014: 66). All of the verbs having the same
semantic categories were next grouped together, and assigned a name,
which corresponded to a subdomain of a general lexical domain following
the conception of domains and subdomains within the Lexical Grammar
Model (LGM) (Faber and Mairal 1999). In other words, in FBT and
EcoLexicon, verb collocations are classified and described according to
lexical meaning. For this reason, they were classified in terms of their
lexical domain, as proposed by the Lexical Grammar Model (Faber and
Mairal 1999) (i.e. the nuclear meaning), and in terms of their subdomain
(i.e. meaning dimension).
As is well known, LGM divides the verb lexicon into twelve lexical
domains. Each domain has one or two generic verbs or superordinates, in
terms of which all members of the domain are directly or indirectly