Lexical Combination of Behavioural Verbal Processes

Abstract

The present study is part of a lexicographical project aimed at collecting the lexical combinations of nouns, verbs, and adjectives for the compilation of a dictionary of collocations for learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). Its objective is to collect the lexical combinations of the units that make up the subdomain of behavioral verbal processes in Spanish, namely, charlar, conversar, hablar, debatir, discutir, describir, lamentarse, quejarse, and mentir, as well as the corresponding nouns derived by nominalization. The theoretical framework combines the Transitivity model of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), as presented in Matthiessen (1995), Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), and, for Spanish, Lavid et al. (2010), with various lines of research in the field of collocation studies (Koike, 2001; Alonso Ramos, 2010; among others). In this article, the methodology for collecting the lexical combinations from the corpora used (CORPES XXI from the Royal Spanish Academy and the Corpus del Español by Mark Davies) is exemplified with a narrower group of verbs and nouns within the domain under study. The article also discusses the collection templates employed and the collocation categories in these templates. The collocations collected for the verbs and the corresponding nouns are grouped by semantic proximity. Furthermore, results of a comparative analysis of these combinations are discussed to establish semantic attributes common to the collocates recorded. This study aims to humbly contribute to both the Transitivity model of SFL and the field of collocation studies.