Semantic Approach to Phraseological Patterns in Karstology

As previous research about collocational patterning (Stubbs 1996, 2001, Flowerdew 2009) has demonstrated, words are restricted in their collocational behaviour. This article aims to illustrate how specialised phraseology reveals restrictional meaning of terminological units as well as patterned syntagmatic relations between terms or terms and other lexical units as a result of a semantic analysis. Two kinds of paradigmatic sets were established: conceptual classes formed by term bases, and semantic sets formed by adjective collocates. Their distributional behaviour is described in order to identify the most recurrent phraseological patterns. Authors point out the importance of combinatorial information for determining specialized meaning and examine the possibility of offering additional information to the terminological definition.