Resumen de A constructional approach to terminological phrasemes
Specialized discourse shows regularities in the lexical and syntactic patterning of terminological units. This fact, evidenced by corpus-based analysis, has spurred a number of studies on polilexical terminological units. In spite of the available linguistic data, however, the systematic management of these units in specialized lexicography is still lacking. Apart from a few exceptions, terminological products, especially dictionaries, are inconsistent with their treatment of these units. Such arbitrary approaches are worthless within the context of the newer terminological knowledge bases. In this paper, we describe how the Lexical Grammar Model can offer an in-depth, principled description of such units. Meaning and grammar are seen as interdependent and complementary layers. So, the basic unit of grammar is a form-meaning pairing or construction that can be described as a conventionalized combination of form and meaning. In this vein, the lexical profile of a specialized concept is composed of constructions, which reflect its collocational patterns both at a lexical and a syntactic level. Thus, we use the umbrella term terminological phraseme (Meyer and Mackintosh 1994) to include entrenched, conventional combinations of linguistic units in the form of complex nominals and predicate-argument structures.
These units are conceived as constructions codifying conceptual, experiential and syntactic information concerning the lexical concepts of a cognitive frame. Consequently, the frame is the element which constrains the potential relations holding between the lexical concepts, and the construals that the frame allows are only a subset of the construals allowed by the argument-taking heads. The basic qualia structure and the domain-specific relations account for such combinations and for the inheritance phenomenon. In sum, we present a theoretical and methodological approach that accounts for the lexical profiles of concepts in a consistent way, including the description of conceptual relations as well as the terms. combinatorial potential.
