Chapter Fifteen
336
defined. Table 1 shows the lexical domains (in square brackets) and their
superordinate verbs (italics) (Faber and Mairal 1999: 88).
(^)
- (i) to be [EXISTENCE]
- (ii) to become different [CHANGE]
- (iii) to have/give [POSSESSION]
- (iv) to say [SPEECH]
- (v) to feel [EMOTION]
- (vi) to do/make [ACTION]
- (vii) to use [MANIPULATION]
- (viii) to know/think [COGNITION/MENTAL PERCEPTION]
- (ix) to move (go/come) [MOVEMENT]
- (x) to become aware (notice/perceive) [GENERAL PERCEPTION]
- (xi) to see/hear/taste/smell/touch [SENSE PERCEPTION]
- (xii) to be/stay/put [POSITION]
Table 1. Lexical domains in the verbal lexicon
Lexical domains can be further subdivided into subdomains. Each
subdomain focuses on a particular area of meaning and reflects a different
specification of its content. For example, as shall be seen, the verbs which
co-occurred with volcano in our corpus were the following: loft, release,
eject, erupt, blast, emit, expel, blow out, spew, spit, belch, fume, bubble,
and spill. The argument structure and definitions of these verbs were
obtained by examining their concordances and by looking them up in a
number of authoritative dictionaries (e.g. American Heritage® Dictionary
of the English Language and Collins English Dictionary) and widely
acknowledged lexicographic databases (e.g. WordNet Thesaurus). Thanks
to the textual and lexicographic evidence found, we could determine that
MOVEMENT is the lexical domain most prototypically activated by the
verbs which collocate with volcano. As such, the superordinate for the
lexical domain of MOVEMENT, to move (go, come), marks the semantic
territory covered by this domain and is the genus of the definition of each
lexeme in the domain. More specifically, the lexical subdomain that
volcano activates within the general domain of MOVEMENT, is that of to
cause motion. It should be highlighted that each subdomain was defined
with its underlying lexical domain in mind and according to the semantic
categories assigned to its arguments.
With the exception of loft, the rest of verbs only co-occur with
NATURAL DISASTERS involving volcanic events, and have two or three
arguments. When there are two arguments, PATIENT is compulsory since it
refers to the MATERIAL that is moved out or away (e.g. ‘Very hot ash can
be blasted across the lands’) and the NATURAL VOLCANIC DISASTER is