Cover not available

Article published In: Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 34:2 (2021) ► pp.402–434

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Multi-word term variation

Prepositional and adjectival complex nominals in Spanish

ORCiD logo with link | University of Granada
ORCiD logo with link | University of Granada
Published online: 15 December 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.19012.cab
Abstract
Complex nominals (CNs) are frequently found in specialized discourse in all languages, since they are a productive method of creating terms by combining existing lexical units. In Spanish, a conceptual combination may often be rendered with a prepositional CN (PCN) or an equivalent adjectival CN (ACN), e.g., demanda de electricidad vs. demanda eléctrica [electricity demand]. Adjectives in ACNs – usually derived from nouns – are known as ‘relational adjectives’ because they encode semantic relations with other concepts. With recent exceptions, research has focused on the underlying semantic relations in CNs. In natural language processing, several works have dealt with the automatic detection of relation adjectives in Romance and Germanic languages. However, there is no discourse studies of these CNs, to our knowledge, for the goal of establishing writer recommendations. This study analyzed the co-text of equivalent PCNs and ACNs to identify factors governing the use of a certain form. EcoLexicon ES, a corpus of Spanish environmental specialized texts, was used to extract 6 relational adjectives and, subsequently, a set of 12 pairs of equivalent CNs. Their behavior in co-text was analyzed by querying EcoLexicon ES and a general language corpus with 20 expressions in CQP-syntax. Our results showed that immediate linguistic co-text determined the preference for a particular structure. Based on these findings, we provide writing guidelines to assist in the production of CNs.
Resumen
La variación en los términos compuestos: Compuestos nominales preposicionales y adjetivales en español
Los compuestos nominales (CN) son frecuentes en el discurso especializado en todas las lenguas, ya que se trata de un método productivo de crear términos mediante la combinación de unidades léxicas existentes. En español, estas combinaciones conceptuales pueden adquirir la forma de CN preposicionales (CNP) o los CN adjetivales (CNA) equivalentes, p. ej. demanda de electricidad vs. demanda eléctrica [electricity demand]. Los adjetivos de los CNA, que suelen proceder de sustantivos, se conocen como ‘adjetivos relacionales’, pues codifican relaciones semánticas con otros conceptos. Excepto algunos estudios recientes, la investigación se ha centrado en las relaciones semánticas que subyacen en los CN. En el ámbito del procesamiento del lenguaje natural, varios estudios han abordado la detección automática de los adjetivos relacionales en lenguas romances y germánicas. Sin embargo, hasta donde alcanza nuestro conocimiento, no se han realizado estudios discursivos de estos CN encaminados a establecer recomendaciones de redacción. En este estudio se analiza el cotexto de CNP y CNA equivalentes para identificar factores que guíen el uso de una determinada forma. Utilizamos el corpus EcoLexicon ES, formado por textos especializados en español sobre el medio ambiente, para extraer 6 adjetivos relacionales y, a continuación, 12 pares de CN equivalentes. Analizamos su comportamiento en cotexto mediante 20 expresiones en CQP aplicadas en el corpus EcoLexicon ES y un corpus general. Los resultados muestran que el cotexto lingüístico inmediato determina la preferencia por una determinada estructura. Según estos resultados, proponemos pautas de redacción para guiar en la producción de CN.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Complex nominals in specialized texts
    • 2.2Variation in complex nominals
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Materials
      • 3.1.1The EcoLexicon Spanish corpus
      • 3.1.2The Spanish Web corpus 2018 (esTenTen18)
      • 3.1.3Sketch Engine and CQL
    • 3.2Methods
      • 3.2.1Extraction of a list of equivalent adjectival and prepositional complex nominals
      • 3.2.2Co-textual and internal analysis
        • 3.2.2.1Extraction of complex nominals modified by adjectives
        • 3.2.2.2Extraction of complex nominals postmodified by prepositional phrases
        • 3.2.2.3Extraction of complex nominals as prepositional modifiers
        • 3.2.2.4Extraction of complex nominals coordinated with other complex nominals
        • 3.2.2.5Extraction of other internal elements
      • 3.2.3Analysis of preference for adjectival or prepositional complex nominals with esTenTen18
  • 4.Variation in complex nominals: Adjectival modification vs. prepositional modification
    • 4.1General trends in EcoLexicon ES
    • 4.2Modification by additional adjectives and prepositional phrases
      • 4.2.1Modification of CNs by additional adjectives
      • 4.2.2Modification of CNs by additional prepositional phrases
      • 4.2.3Semantic-constrained preference for interpositional or postpositional modification
      • 4.2.4Dependency analysis
    • 4.3Complex nominals as postpositional modifiers
    • 4.4Coordination with other complex nominals
    • 4.5Sentence length and type
  • 5.Recommendations of use
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (70)
References
Baldwin, T., & Kim, S. N. (2010). Multiword Expressions. In N. Indurkhya & F. J. Damerau (Eds.), Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Second Edition (pp. 267–292). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bally, C. (1909 [1951]). Traité de stylistique française. Heidelberg: C. Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1965). Linguistique génerale et lingustique française. Bern: Francke Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bocanegra-Valle, A., Lario de Oñate, M. C., & López Torres, E. (2008). English for Specific Purposes: Studies for Classroom Development and Implementation. Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bowker, L. (1998). Using Specialized Monolingual Native-Language Corpora as a Translation Resource: A Pilot Study. Meta, 43(4), 631–651. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cabezas-García, M., & Faber, P. (2017). A Semantic Approach to the Inclusion of Complex Nominals in English Terminographic Resources. In R. Mitkov (Ed.), Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 10596 (pp. 145–159). Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cabezas-García, M., & León-Araúz, P. (2018). Towards the Inference of Semantic Relations in Complex Nominals: a Pilot Study. In N. Calzolari et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) (pp. 2511–2518). Miyazaki, Japan: ELRA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2019). On the Structural Disambiguation of Multi-word Terms. In G. Corpas Pastor & R. Mitkov (Eds.), Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11755 (pp. 46–60). Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cabré, M. T. (1999). La terminología: representación y comunicación. Elementos para una teoría de base comunicativa y otros artículos. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carrió-Pastor, M. L., & Candel-Mora, M. A. (2012). Corpus analysis: a pragmatic perspective on term variation. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, 25(1), 33–50.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cartoni, B. (2008). De l’incomplétude lexicale en traduction automatique : vers une approche morphosémantique multilingue. PhD. Université de Genève.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009). Lexical morphology in machine translation: A feasibility study. In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL 2009) (pp. 130–138). Athens: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Christ, O., Schulze, B. M., Hofmann, A., & König, E. (1999). The IMS Corpus Workbench: Corpus Query Processor (CQP) – User’s Manual. Institute for Natural Language Processing. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cowie, A. P. (1981). The Treatment of Collocations and Idioms in Learners’ Dictionaries. Applied Linguistics, 2(3), 223–235. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruse, D. A. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Daille, B. (2001). Qualitative Terminology Extraction: Identifying Relational Adjectives. In D. Bourigault et al. (Eds.), Recent Advances in Computational Terminology (pp. 149–166). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Daille, B., Dufour-Kowalski, S., & Morin, E. (2004). French-English Multi-word Term Alignment Based on Lexical Context Analysis. In M. T. Lino et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 919–922). Lisbon: ELRA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Downing, P. (1977). On the Creation and Use of English Compound Nouns. Language, 53(4), 810–842. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Escandell Vidall, M. V. (1995). Cortesía, fórmulas convencionales y estrategias indirectas. Revista Española de Lingüística, 25(1), 31–66.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evert, S., & Hardie, A. (2011). Twenty-first century Corpus Workbench: Updating a query architecture for the new millennium. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2011 Conference (pp. 1–21). Birmingham: University of Birmingham.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faber, P., León-Araúz, P., & Reimerink, A. (2014). Representing Environmental Knowledge in EcoLexicon. In E. Bárcena et al. (Eds.), Languages for Specific Purposes in the Digital Era. Educational Linguistics, vol. 191 (pp. 267–301). Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faber, P., & León-Araúz, P. (2016). Specialized knowledge representation and the parameterization of context. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(196). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández Fuertes, R., Álvarez de la Fuente, E., Parrado Román, I., & Muñiz Fernández, S. (2008). La “bici pirata” se convierte en “pirate bike” o en “bike pirate”: la composición nominal en datos de adquisición de niños. In L. Pérez Ruiz, I. Pizarro Sánchez, & E. González-Cascos Jiménez (Eds.), Estudios de metodología de la lengua inglesa (IV) (pp. 421–438). Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gagné, C. L. (2000). Relational-Based Combinations Versus Property-Based Combinations: A Test of the CARIN Theory and the Dual-Process Theory of Conceptual Combination. Journal of Memory and Language, 421, 365–389. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gangemi, A., Pisanelli, D. M., & Steve, G. (2000). Understanding Systematic Conceptual Structures in Polysemous Medical Terms. In M. J. Overhage (Ed.), Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium 2000 (pp. 285–289). Philadelphia, PA: Hanley & Belfus.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geeraerts, D., Grondelaers, S., & Bakema, P. (1994). The structure of lexical variation. Meaning, naming, and context. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gledhill, C., & Pecman, M. (2018). On Alternating Pre-Modified and Post-Modified Nominals Such As Aspirin Synthesis Versus Synthesis of Aspirin: Rhetorical and Cognitive Packing in English Science Writing. Fachsprache, 1(2), 26–48.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haralambous, Y., & Lavagnino, E. (2011). La réduction de termes complexes dans les langues de spécialité. Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL), 52(1), 37–68.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harastani, R., Daille, B., & Morin, E. (2013). Identification, alignement, et traductions des adjectifs relationnels en corpus comparables. In Vingtième conférence du Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel 2013 (TALN 2013) (pp. 313–326). Sables d’Olonne, France: ATALA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, A., & Renau, I. (2013). EsTenTen, a vast web corpus of Peninsular and American Spanish. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 951, 12–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, A., Rychlý, P., Smrz, P., & Tugwell, D. (2004). The Sketch Engine. In G. Williams & S. Vessier (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress (pp. 105–115). Lorient: EURALEX.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lees, R. B. (1960). The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press/The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
León-Araúz, P. (2017). Term and Concept Variation in Specialized Knowledge Dynamics. In P. Drouin et al. (Eds.), Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation (pp. 213–258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levi, J. N. (1978). The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liceras, J. M. (2001). La teoría lingüística y la composición nominal del español y del inglés. In P. Fernández Nistal & J. M. Bravo (Eds.), Pathways of Translation Studies (pp. 229–248). Valladolid: S.A.E. University of Valladolid.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liceras, J. M., Díaz, L., & Salomaa-Robertson, T. (2002). Processing versus representational difficulty in the acquisition of Spanish N-N Compounding. In A. T. Pérez-Leroux & J. M. Liceras (Eds.), The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax (pp. 209–237). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lorente Casafont, M., Martínez Salom, M. A., Santamaría-Perez, I., & Vargas-Sierra, C. (2017). Specialized collocations in specialized dictionaries. In S. Torner Castells & E. Bernal (Eds.), Collocations and other lexical combinations in Spanish: theoretical, lexicographical and applied perspectives (pp. 200–222). London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lyons, J. (1995). Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mairal Usón, R., & Cortés Rodríguez, F. J. (2000). Semantic packaging and syntactic projections in word formation processes: the case of agent nominalizations. RESLA, 141, 271–294.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maniez, F. (2009). L’adjectif dénominal en langue de spécialité: étude du domaine de la médicine. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 141, 117–130. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2014). Implantation of English Terms Including the -ING Morpheme in French, Spanish and Italian: A Corpus-Based Study of the Debates of the European Parliament. In P. Dury et al. (Eds.), La néologie en langue de spécialité : détection, implantation et circulation des nouveaux termes (pp. 189–201). Lyon: Travaux du CRTT.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martín Arista, J. (1997). La representación subyacente de los compuestos nominales en una gramática funcional del inglés. Atlantis, 19(2), 169–175.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mélis-Puchulu, A. (1991). Les adjectifs dénominaux: des adjectifs de relation. Lexique, 101, 33–60.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moreno-Fernández, F. (2003). Anglicismos en el léxico disponible de los adolescentes hispanos de Chicago. In K. Potowski & R. Cameron (Eds.), Spanish in Contact (pp. 41–58). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. (1988). Comprehending complex concepts. Cognitive Science, 121, 529–562. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1990). Noun phrase interpretation and conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and Language, 291, 259–288. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nakov, P. (2013). On the Interpretation of Noun Compounds: Syntax, Semantics, and Entailment. Natural Language Engineering, 19(3), 291–330. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nakov, P., & Hearst, M. (2006). Using Verbs to Characterize Noun-Noun Relations. In J. Euzenat & J. Domingue (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Applcations. AIMSA 2006 (pp. 233–244). Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nastase, V., & Szpakowicz, S. (2003). Exploring Noun-Modifier Semantic Relations. In Fifth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (pp. 285–301). Tilburg: IWCS.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Padró, L., Collado, M., Reese, S., Lloberes, M., & Castellón, I. (2010). FreeLing 2.1: Five Years of Open-Source Language Processing Tools. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odij, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010) (pp. 931–936). La Valletta: ELRA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Palacios Martínez, I. (2014). Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics, 19(3), 383–405. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Postal, P. M. (1969). Anaphoric islands. In R. I. Binnick et al. (Eds.), Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 209–239). Chicago: University of Chicago.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Juárez, C. (2017). Accounting for the Alternating Behaviour of Location Arguments from the Perspective of Role and Reference Grammar. ATLANTIS, Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 39(2), 169–189. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosario, B., Hearst, M., & Fillmore, C. (2002). The Descent of Hierarchy, and Selection in Relational Semantics. In P. Isabelle (Ed.), ACL ’02 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 247–254). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sager, J. C., Dungworth, D., & McDonald, P. F. (1980). English Special Languages: Principles and Practice in Science and Technology. Wiesbaden: Oscar Branstetter Verlag KG.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M., & Richards, H. (2013). The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. Linguistics, 51(2), 258–324. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Štekauer, P., Valera, S., & Kőrtvélyessy, L. (2012). Word-Formation in the World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vanderwende, L. (1994). Algorithm for Automatic Interpretation of Noun Sequences. In M. Nagao (Ed.), COLING ’94 Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 782–788). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Warren, B. (1978). Semantic Patterns of Noun-Noun Compounds. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wisniewski, E. J. (1996). Construal and similarity in conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and Language, 351, 434–453. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Chambó, Santiago & Pilar León Araúz
2023. Corpus-driven conceptual analysis of epidemic and coronavirus for the Humanitarian Encyclopedia. Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 29:2 ► pp. 180 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue