Despite its importance, Environmental Law has largely been ignored in environmental knowledge bases. EcoLexicon (ecolexicon.ugr.es) has recently begun to include information on the domain. This paper takes the methodological perspective of Frame-based Terminology [1, 2, 3] 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 behaviour of verbs collocating with pollution in Environmental Science and Environmental Law. Verbs were classified based on the lexical domains and semantic classes in Faber and Mairal [4]. The differences were mostly based on the specificity of the other arguments and the emphasis on the polluter in Environmental Law. This resulted in a proposal for the inclusion and configuration of legal information in EcoLexicon.
POLLUTION are more prominent in this subdomain as compared to the environmental domain as a whole: time and origin (see examples 3 and 4).
1. The pollutants disperse in a downward direction causing substantial air pollution at ground level but cannot escape upwards because of the inversion. 2. …the polluter pays principle, the person responsible for the pollution cannot be identified or cannot be held liable under Community or national legislation… 3. Indeed, the phenomenon of historical pollution represents the result of the convergence and interaction of a number of different factors… 4. Historically the regulation of vessel-source pollution has engendered conflict between coastal States…
These results entailed changes in the conceptual networks and the definitions of EcoLexicon. Since these differences at the conceptual level also affect the linguistic level, namely, the choice of verbs, terms and phraseological structures, this study analyzed verb collocations in Environmental Law to add to the phraseology module of EcoLexicon, which is currently under construction. In this pilot study, we focus on phraseology in English. Future research will also address the topic in Spanish, one of the other major languages of EcoLexicon.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 explains the phraseology extraction method and the results; Section 3 provides a proposal for the representation of these results in the phraseology module; and Sections 4 summarizes the conclusions that can be derived from this research.
When completed, the phraseology module of EcoLexicon will be one of the most important for the
representation of Environmental Law data because of its legal terminology. The phraseology module
is based on a wide interpretation of the concept of collocation and at its core are verb collocations. In
FBT, verb collocations are frequent combinations of two or more lexical units composed of a noun +
verb or a verb + noun where the meaning of the verb is limited by the meaning of the noun. However,
at the same time, the verb restricts the type of noun with which it can combine [
To compare the collocational behaviour of pollution in Environmental Science and the subdomain
of Environmental Law, Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu/) [
The ESSG is a Corpus Query Language (CQL)-based grammar [
After extraction, verbs were categorized according to the lexical domains in Faber and Mairal [
The data extracted are in Tables 1-4 in the Annex. Table 1 shows that the verbs that collocate with pollution in both corpora mostly belong to the domain of CAUSATIVE EXISTENCE, more specifically to cause something to exist (cause), to cause something to cease to exist (eliminate), and to cause something to not happen (prevent, avoid). Other important lexical domains are CHANGE, more specifically, to cause something to change by decreasing it (abate, reduce, minimize, mitigate, decrease, limit) and MANIPULATION (control, monitor). Finally, the lexical domains of VISUAL PERCEPTION, COGNITION, and SPEECH are present with verbs such as consider, define, regard.
In both word sketches, air is high up on the list. However this is a tagging mistake as in these cases air is a noun in an adjectival position and not a verb. The tagging mistake occurs in constructions where the tagger is incapable of interpreting to as a preposition.
In the word sketch of verbs with pollution as subject (see Table 2), there are fewer results for the EEC because the numbers of collocations with pollution did not exceed a certain threshold. This makes sense because the EEC is a corpus on the environment. Pollution is thus only one of the aspects to be considered. In contrast, in the enLaw corpus, pollution is a central concept, and that is why collocations with pollution are statistically more relevant. The lexical domain of the verbs that predominate in both corpora is EXISTENCE: originate, occur, arise, be, emanate, become, include. Another lexical domain present in both corpora is CHANGE (reduce, increase), to cause something to change by making it worse (destroy, damage, harm, threaten) and more general causative verbs such as cause, affect, derive, result.
The verb flush in the EEC word sketch of pollution is the result of the term pollution flushing,
which is a process through which pollution is removed from a water body through natural or artificial
currents or tides. It can be classified as to cause something to cease to exist (EXISTENCE) or as
MOVEMENT [
After analysing pollution, we also analysed the verb pollute and the noun polluter in Word Sketch. When looking at the results for the word sketch object_of, there were no obvious differences between the verb’s behaviour in enLaw and EEC, apart from the difference in the number of results. Table 3 shows polluter as the object of verbs. Once again, the enLaw corpus provides more results, some of which are directly related to the legal domain: prosecute, sue. Another important lexical domain is MANIPULATION: implement, regulate, oblige, force, compel, deter, require, etc. Finally, the word sketch polluter subject_of showed the verb pay as the very first result for both corpora. This is of course because one of the most important principles of Environmental Law is the polluter-pays principle.
Apart from the fact that there are more results for pollution in enLaw, the lexical domains of the verbs collocating with pollution were very similar in both corpora. The differences pertained to the arguments of the verbs.
Figure 1 (see Annex) shows an extract of the concordances of the CQL abate + pollution in enLaw. The second argument that collocates with this combination is an institutional body (state, UK), a company (industries, firms), measure (measures) or cost (expenditures, costs). The second argument for the CQL minimise + pollution (Figure 2) is mostly measure (requirements, directive, measures). The second argument for the CQL control + pollution (Figure 3) includes institutional body (state, administration, agencies) and measure (strategies, measures, regulations, laws).
In Environmental Law, the verbs abate, minimise and control would be included in the phraseology module under the term pollution in the following phrasemes: INSTITUTIONAL BODY/COMPANY/MEASURE/COST + CHANGE [decrease] + POLLUTION; INSTITUTIONAL BODY/MEASURE + MANIPULATION + POLLUTION.
One of the participants that is specific to the POLLUTION frame in Environmental Law is evidently the POLLUTER. Figure 4 shows an extract of the concordances of the CQL pollution caused_by in enLaw. The cause is evidently the polluting industry (ship, operational discharges, activities) or the person or entity responsible (polluters, manufacturers, persons, parties, corporation).
The results showed that the lexical domains of the verbs that collocate with pollution were quite similar in the EEC and enLaw corpora. The differences are mostly based on the specificity of the other arguments and the emphasis on the POLLUTER in the Environmental Law subdomain. To represent this in the phraseology module, under the term pollution, the choice of example sentences provided for the subdomain would be the following (Figure 5).
The results described in this paper show that Frame-based Terminology provides the methodological underpinnings to extract the subtle differences between Environmental Science and its subdomains at the linguistic level. Specifically, verbal collocations in the Environmental Law domain differ from those in the Environmental Science domain in regard to the specificity of the arguments. These differences must be included in terminological knowledge bases in order to provide an accurate representation of environmental knowledge. Differences at the conceptual level pervade the linguistic level because of the choice of verbs and their arguments. Representing this phraseological knowledge for all the terms in EcoLexicon in English and in Spanish will be one of the challenges for the future development of EcoLexicon.
This research was carried out as part of the projects PID2020-118369GBI00 and A-HUM-600UGR20, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Regional Government of Andalusia.
2997 control cause prevent combat reduce eliminate air address regulate avoid minimise abate concern emit limit regard produce generate tackle mitigate minimize include define increase cover