Abs-38 Miriam Buendía-Castro and Pamela Faber (University of Granada, Spain) Verbs as key elements in specialized knowledge representation Corpus linguistic studies in have focused mainly on the description and analysis of terms that are noun phrases, and have played down the need of the description of other lexical units, such as verbs (Guilbert 1973; Rey 1975; Sager 1990; L’Homme 1998). However, recent studies have highlighted the importance of verbs when they are activated in specialized texts (L’Homme 1998; Lorente 2007). In fact, much of our knowledge is made up of events and states, most of which can be linguistically represented by verbs (Faber 1999).

In this paper we study the behaviour of verbs in specialized texts, and provide evidence of how they affect the representation of conceptual information. All the examples used to illustrate our approach were taken from a subcorpus of meteorological texts of one million words, which is part of the larger corpus designed for the Ecosystem research project*, as reflected in the EcoLexicon knowledge base (http://manila.ugr.es/visual). These examples are typical of processes and actions within the EXTREME_EVENT frame in its sense of natural disaster.

Firstly, the conceptual description of this frame was established. The concept of EXTREME_EVENT was thus linked to its subtypes, such as HURRICANE, TORNADO, EARTHQUAKE, FLOOD, etc., by a closed inventory of conceptual relations. Each subtype has its own set of subordinate concepts and conceptual relations, which encode more specific sub-event knowledge and representation.

Afterwards, the verbs activated by the concepts denoting natural disasters were extracted, based on their frequency and recurrence in texts. Verbs were classified according to their lexical domain membership, based on the parameters of the Lexical Grammar Model** (Martín Mingorance 1984, 1989, 1995; Faber and Mairal 1999). Verb meaning was finally analyzed in terms of the semantic interactions that predicates maintain with their arguments and their semantic roles in real examples of text extracted from the corpus.

Our results show that the basic meaning of each verb profiles the meaning of the different concepts linked to EXTREME_EVENT in different ways, and offers a way to access the multidimensionality of terms and the concepts they designate. This study also highlights that when nominal terms are studied in conjunction with the verbs that most frequently activate them, this affords valuable information regarding conceptual representation. In fact, verb meaning and argument structure are crucial for the representation of conceptual information connected with the network of semantic relations activated by a specialized knowledge unit.

Notes:

*This research is part of the Project Ecosystem: Single Information Space for Frame-based Environmental Data and Thesaurus (FFI2008-06080-C03-01/FILO) funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation.

**This model was previously called the Functional Lexematic Model.

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