Combinatorial patterns of the Spanish term delito and phraseological variation in a corpus of Hispanic normative texts on organised crime

Abstract

This paper analyses the combinatorics of the terminological unit of law (TUL) delito in a corpus of Hispanic normative texts on organised crime (CRIMO) around three relevant semantic values in this specialised domain. First, we have extracted the verb-noun constructions (VNCs) (cf. Tabares Plasencia, 2012), including the terminological nucleus delito with object function and distributed them according to the semantic value to which they are associated. Subsequently, their morphosyntactic behaviour has been described, and then the different types of phraseological variation have been delimited. The analysis has led to the following conclusions: (i) both concurrent variation (topolectally motivated heterovariation) and co-occurring variation (self-variation in a broad sense) are found; (ii) concurrent variation is, in general terms, a controlled variation, and (iii) the morphosyntactic behaviour of VNCs is similar.