Verb Collocations for Natural Disasters: a Contrastive Study of Mexican and Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

This research shows how to identify the diatopic verb phraseological differences between Mexican and peninsular Spanish in environmental texts, and more specifically, within the domain of natural disasters. The study is performed by analyzing five Mexican dictionaries as well as a specialized corpus. The environmental event (EE) and the sematic category of natural disasters were organized based on the premises of Frame-based Terminology (FBT) (Faber 2009, 2011, 2012). In FBT, the EE represents and configures the most generic categories within the field of environmental science. Semantic categories in FBT are generalizations of a set of terms that have a similar semantic and syntactic behavior. To detect diatopic variants an integrated top-down and bottom-up approach was followed. As such, all the potential members of the semantic category natural disaster in Spanish were searched in various dictionaries (top-down approach). Subsequently, these terms were extracted and analyzed in corpus texts (bottom-up approach) to find the most frequent verb collocations and argument patterns. This research highlights that phraseological diatopic varieties exist at a morphosyntactic, morphological, and lexical level in specialized discourse. The conclusion is that specialized dictionaries and other terminographic resources should incorporate these varieties so that users can become aware of them and use them when needed.