Semantic and Conceptual Aspects of Volcano Verbs 347not gas-like fluids (smoke, fumes, gases), ashes or fire (flames). By contrast,
these verbs, when carrying general meaning, are discriminating units in
certain cases. For example, belch does not imply food and spit does not
entail gases.
Conclusions
This chapter semantically and conceptually describes verb terms that
collocate with volcano within the ENVIRONMENTAL EVENT frame (Faber
2009, 2011, 2012). This is a formal proposal that uses semantic and
conceptual frames devised to characterize and relate the terminological
units of the EVENT by identifying their underlying conceptual relations.
First of all, the arguments of the volcano verbs in the general lexical
domain of MOVEMENT were assigned a semantic category (e.g. NATURAL
DISASTER, MATERIAL ENTITY, LANDFORM, EXPLOSIVE). Then, all of the
verbs having the same semantic categories were grouped together, and
assigned a name, which corresponded to a subdomain of a general lexical
domain within the Lexical Grammar Model (Faber and Mairal 1999). As
such, the lexical domain most prototypically activated by volcano in the
general domain of MOVEMENT was to cause motion. This was done
following a top-down and bottom up approach, where the argument
structure of these verbs were obtained by examining their concordances
drawn from a corpus of specialized texts on environment, geology, and
volcanology.
Empirical evidence showed that the arguments of these verbs are
activated in the construction EARTH NATURAL DISASTER causes MATERIAL to
move forcefully in a certain direction. The volcano verbs analyzed are
argued to conform to this argument structure construction at a general
level of analysis; however, the examination and comparison of dictionary
senses of the verbs revealed that the semantic specifics of each volcano
verb constrain its capacity for collocation with certain arguments while
they prompt the co-occurrence of the verb with other arguments in running
texts within the volcanology discourse. This claim was confirmed by
textual evidence found in terminological usage contexts extracted from our
specialized corpus texts dealing with geology and volcanology.
Metaphorical meaning extensions from general language to specialized
language were found to be involved in the semantic constraints of some
volcano verbs. A relation between generic and more specific definitions of
the verbs was identified, taking the semantic unit a fluid or material
coming out of the mouth as the unalterable basis for comparison.
Dictionary usage context examples and definitions, such as ‘to become