Collocations and aviation terms

Collocations have a great potencial to the understanding of meanings, senses and concepts of words or terms they compound. In this article, we studied the collocations of the terms “segurança” in Portuguese, and “safety” and “security” in English, in aviation language. Our aims were to search for a better understanding of the studied conceptual units, and to offer a discussion about the role of collocations in Terminology. We built two comparable corpora, one with Portuguese texts from the Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency and the Brazilian Air Force, and another one with English texts from the International Civil Aviation Organization. We focused on the main collocations of the three terms in Portuguese and in English. The theoretical frame we adopted was the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CABRÉ, 1999) and we used the techniques of Corpus Linguistics (TAGNIN, 2010, 2013; BERBER SARDINHA, 2000) to design our methodology, assisted by the software WordSmith Tools, version 6.0. (SCOTT, 2012). We found noun and adjective collocations. The study is addressed to professionals, teachers and tranlators who make use of aviation language.   KEY-WORDS: Terms of Aviation; Terminology; Corpus Linguistics; Collocations.