Phraseology and Culture in Terminological Knowledge Bases: The Case of Pollution and Environmental Law

Abstract

Despite its importance, environmental law has largely been ignored in environmental knowledge bases. This may be due to the fact that legal issues may not, strictly speaking, be considered scientific knowledge in environmental knowledge resources, which may in turn relate to the complexity of reflecting the cultural component (which includes different legal systems) in the description of terms and concepts. The terminological knowledge base EcoLexicon has recently begun to include information on environmental law. This paper takes the methodological perspective of frame-based terminology to analyze typical verb collocations in environmental law that will be added to the phraseology module of EcoLexicon. Corpus analysis was used to compare the behavior of verbs collocating with pollution in environmental science and environmental law. Verbs were classified based on lexical domains and semantic classes through definition factorization, as described in the Lexical Grammar Model. The differences were mostly based on the specificity of the arguments and the emphasis on the polluter in environmental law. This resulted in a proposal for the inclusion and configuration of environmental law phraseology in EcoLexicon, showing sociocultural differences across environmental subdomains.