Lexicon-grammar

Lexicon-Grammar is a method and a praxis of formalized description of human languages, which considers that the systematic investigation of lexical entries is presently the main challenge of the scientific study of languages. The development of Lexicon-Grammar began in the late 1960s under Maurice Gross. Its theoretical basis is Zellig S. Harris's distributionalism, and notably the notion of transformational rule. The notational conventions are meant to be as clear and comprehensible as possible. The method of Lexicon-Grammar is inspired from hard sciences. It focuses on data collection, hence on the real use of language, both from a quantitative and observational point of view.

Lexicon-grammar also requires formalisation. The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to be usable for natural language processing, in particular through the development of parsers. The information model is such that the results of the description take the form of two-dimensional tables, also called matrices, which cross-tabulate entries with syntactic-semantic properties. As a result, the Lexicon-grammar addresses "the problem of correlations between syntax and the lexicon." Experiments showed that several researchers or teams can make their observations cumulative. The term lexicon-grammar is used for the first time by Annibale Elia, after grammar-lexicon by Carl Vikner.

Theoretical basis The theoretical basis of Lexicon-grammar is Zellig Harris' distributional structuralism, and in particular the notion of transformation in the sense of Zellig Harris. Maurice Gross was a student of Zellig Harris. "The view of language of Maurice Gross and his followers is a combination of structuralism and transformational grammar." The Lexicon-grammar also uses semantics: "the definition of a transformational rule explicitly involves meaning, since transformationally related sentences must have identical meanings. (...) Transformationally related sentences may have systematic differences of meaning." The main difference with Harris' approach is that the native speaker first guesses the elementary sentence (or kernel sentence) of lexical items on an intuitive basis, before transformational analysis confirms or infirms the guess. Harris' approach consists in investigating transformation rules in priority, which discloses the elementary sentences of lexical items as a final result of the analysis. The conventions for the presentation of grammatical information are intended to be as simple and transparent as possible. This concern comes from Zellig Harris, whose theory is oriented towards directly observable surface forms; this differs from Generative Grammar, which normally uses abstract structures such as deep structures.

Fact collection The Lexicon-Grammar method is inspired by experimental science. It emphasizes the collection of facts, confronting the researcher with the reality of language use, from a quantitative and an observational point of view. Quantitatively: a lexicon-grammar includes a program of systematic description of the lexicon, including observing for each lexical entry in which syntactic constructions it occurs. This involves large-scale work, which can be carried out by teams and not by individual specialists. The exclusive search for general rules of syntax, independent of the lexical material they handle, is dismissed as a dead end. This is different from Generative Grammar, which values the notion of generalization. Observationally: methodological precautions are applied to ensure good reproducibility of observations, and in particular to guard against the risks associated with constructed examples. One of these precautions is to take as a minimum unit of meaning the basic sentence. Indeed, a word acquires a precise meaning only in a context; moreover, by inserting a word in a sentence, one has the advantage of manipulating a sequence that may be judged acceptable or unacceptable. It is at this price that syntactic-semantic properties are considered as defined with sufficient precision that it makes sense to test and check them against the whole lexicon. These precautions have evolved in line with needs and the appearance of new technical means. Thus, from the beginning of the 1990s, the contributors of the Lexicon-Grammar have been able to use attested examples in text corpora more and more easily. This new precaution has simply been added to the previous ones, positioning the Lexicon-Grammar simultaneously in introspective linguistics and in corpus linguistics, much as advocated by Fillmore. The American projects FrameNet and VerbNet show a relative convergence towards objectives close to those of Lexicon-Grammar.

Formalisation Lexicon-grammar also requires formalisation. The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to allow for:

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.