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Understanding the concept emission

A corpus-based study on environmental legislation

ORCiD logo with link | University of Valladolid
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Abstract
The climate crisis has placed environmental protection at the forefront of global agendas, emphasizing the need for precise terminology in policy and communication. This study focuses on the term emission, central to environmental discourse, particularly in international legislation. It applies a multi-step methodology to analyze the term emission: (1) conceptual information extraction from the definition; (2) corpus-based analysis of the conceptual features of multi-word terms (MWTs); (3) analysis of the predicate argument structure of the term; (4) semantic analysis of the verbs collocating with emission; (5) corpus-based extraction of relations and attributes; and (6) representation of its definitional template or frame. These steps yield rich conceptual insights into the emission concept, enabling the creation of a comprehensive definitional frame. This template captures how emission functions within environmental legislation and enhances understanding of environmental terminology. Additionally, it contributes to EcoLexicon, a multilingual environmental knowledge base, thereby supporting broader knowledge dissemination.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Pragmatics
    • 2.2Frame-based Terminology
      • 2.2.1Cognitive frames and events
    • 2.3The environmental law and emission events in EcoLexicon
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Materials
    • 3.2Methods
      • 3.2.1Conceptual information extraction from the definition
      • 3.2.2Analysis of conceptual features in the corpus from MWTs
      • 3.2.3Analysis of the predicate argument structure of the term
      • 3.2.4Analysis of verbs collocating with the event and their semantic scope
      • 3.2.5Corpus-based extraction of relations and attributes
      • 3.2.6Representation of the frame definitional template
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1The emission definitional template
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (51)
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