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Lexicon-grammar

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Lexicon-Grammar is a method and a praxis of formalized description of human languages, [1][2] which considers that the systematic investigation of lexical entries is presently the main challenge of the scientific study of languages. [3] The development of Lexicon-Grammar began in the late 1960s under Maurice Gross.

Its theoretical basis is Zellig S. Harris's[4] [5] distributionalism, [3] and notably the notion of transformational rule. [6] The notational conventions are meant to be as clear and comprehensible as possible. [7]

The method of Lexicon-Grammar is inspired from hard sciences. [8] 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. [9] The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to be usable for natural language processing, in particular through the development of parsers. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] The information model is such that the results of the description take the form of two-dimensional tables, also called matrices. [6] Lexicon-grammar tables cross-tabulate lexical entries with their syntactic-semantic properties. [3] [15] As a result, they make up a database of syntactic-semantic information. [16]

Experiments showed that several researchers or teams can make their observations cumulative. [17]

The term lexicon-grammar is used for the first time by Annibale Elia. [18]

Theoretical basis

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The theoretical basis of Lexicon-grammar is Zellig Harris' distributionalism,[4] and in particular the notion of transformation in the sense of Zellig Harris. [6][19][20] Maurice Gross was a student of Zellig Harris. The conventions for the presentation of grammatical information are intended to be as simple and transparent as possible. [7] 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

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The Lexicon-Grammar method is inspired by experimental science. [8] It emphasizes the collection of facts, confronting the researcher with the reality of language use, from a quantitative and an observational point of view.[21]

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. [3][22] 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.[23] 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.[24] One of these precautions is to take as a minimum unit of meaning the basic sentence.[25] [26] [15] 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.[3] [6] [27] 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.[28][29] This new precaution has simply been added to the previous ones, positioning the Lexicon-Grammar simultaneously in introspective linguistics [30] and in corpus linguistics, much as advocated by Fillmore.[31] The American projects FrameNet[32] and VerbNet[33] show a relative convergence towards objectives close to those of Lexicon-Grammar.

Formalisation

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Lexicon-grammar also requires formalisation.[9] The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to allow for:

Results

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The results obtained through the application of these methodological principles by several dozen linguists over several decades constitute a database of syntactic-semantic information for natural language processing. The quality of this database can be assessed by considering:

  • its size, measurable by the number of entries,
  • the richness of the linguistic phenomena it covers, measurable by the number of properties,
  • and its degree of formalization.

For French, more than 75,000 entries have been established;[34] more or less substantial descriptions—always following the same model—exist for about ten other languages,[6][19][27][35][28][29][36][37] the best-represented being Italian,[38] Portuguese,[39] Modern Greek,[40][41] and Korean.[42][43]

Work has been carried out and published within the Lexicon–Grammar framework on predicative nouns since the 1970s,[44][45] and on fixed expressions since the 1980s.[46][47]

The notion of a noun predicate comes from the work of Zellig Harris.[4] It is based on the following parallel: if, for example, the verb study is analyzed as the predicate in the sentence Luke studies eclipses, then it is natural to analyze the noun study—or the sequence carry out a study—as a predicate in the sentence Luke carries out a study on eclipses. In this case, the noun in question is called a noun predicate. The verb that accompanies it—here carry out—is referred to as a support verb (it). This idea has been systematically applied in the Lexicon–Grammar framework since the 1970s.[48][49][50][51][52][53]

Lexicon–Grammar contributors use the term 'fixed expression' when an expression (for example state of the art) has specific properties (here, its meaning) that justify giving it its own lexical entry, even though it is made up of several elements (state, of, the, and art) that can, in one way or another, be considered individual words.[46] A systematic program for describing such expressions has been undertaken within the Lexicon–Grammar framework since the 1980s.[19][54][55][56][57][58][59]

Cumulativity

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These experiments have shown that several individuals or teams can arrive at identical results. This reproducibility ensures the cumulativity of the descriptions. This outcome is crucial for the future of language processing: the amount of data that must be gathered and represented within a coherent model is such that many research and development teams have to collaborate, and it must be possible to merge their results without having to rewrite substantial parts of the grammar and lexicon of each language. This requirement is far from easy to meet, as there are few known examples of grammars of significant size that are not the work of a single specialist.[17][60][61]

Interface with international standards

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With the goal of improving the availability of the data in a clear and explicit way, part of the French Lexicon–Grammar has been transcoded into the ISO-standard LMF format.[62]

References

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  1. ^ Geyken, Alexander (2006). "Lexicon Grammars". Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. By Brown, Keith (2nd ed.). Elsevier. pp. 134–138. doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00429-6. ISBN 978-0-08-044854-1.
  2. ^ La Valley, Sydney G. (2020). A Lexicon-Grammar Analysis of "away" Expressions (MA thesis). Florida International University. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Page vi.
  3. ^ a b c d e Gross, Maurice (1968). Transformational Analysis of French Verbal Constructions (PDF). Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers. Vol. 74. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Pages I-II.
  4. ^ a b c Harris, Zellig (1964). "Transformations in Linguistic Structure". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 108 (5).
  5. ^ Harris, Zellig (1976). Notes du cours de syntaxe (in French). Paris: Seuil.
  6. ^ a b c d e Salkoff, Morris (1983). "Bees Are Swarming in the Garden: A Systematic Synchronic Study of Productivity". Language. 59 (2): 288–346. doi:10.2307/413576. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  7. ^ a b Gross, Maurice (1968). Transformational Analysis of French Verbal Constructions (PDF). Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers. Vol. 74. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Pages I-V.
  8. ^ a b De Bueriis, Giustino; Langella, Alberto Maria (2019). "Algebraic Lexicon Grammar". International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature. 11 (3). Las Vegas: 21–42. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Page 22.
  9. ^ a b Elia, Annibale; Monteleone, Mario; Marano, Federica (2011). From the concept of transformation in Harris and Chomsky to the Lexique-Grammaire of Maurice Gross (PDF). 12th International Conference of the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XII). Saint-Petersburg: The Linguistic Society of Saint-Petersburg. pp. 76–82. Retrieved 4 December 2025. Page 76.
  10. ^ a b Salkoff, Morris (1990). Automatic translation of support verb constructions (PDF). Coling. Vol. 3. ACL. pp. 243–246. doi:10.3115/991146.991189. ISBN 952-90-2028-7. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  11. ^ a b Roche, Emmanuel (1997). "Parsing with Finite-State Transducers". Finite-State Language Processing. By Roche, Emmanuel; Schabès, Yves. Cambridge, Mass. / London: MIT Press. pp. 241–281. ISBN 9780262527705. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  12. ^ a b Delamar, Michel (12 December 2001). "Maurice Gross". Université Paris Diderot (in French). Paris. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  13. ^ a b Mota, Cristina; Baptista, Jorge; Barreiro, Anabela (2019). "The Lexicon-Grammar of Predicate Nouns with ser de in Port4NooJ". Formalizing Natural Languages with NooJ 2018 and Its Natural Language Processing Applications. By Mirto, Ignazio Mauro; Monteleone, Mario; Silberztein, Max. Springer. pp. 124–137. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-10868-7_12. ISBN 978-3-030-10868-7. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  14. ^ a b Guarasci, Raffaele; Damiano, Emanuele; Minutolo, Aniello; Esposito, Massimo; de Pietro, Giuseppe (2020). "Lexicon-Grammar based open information extraction from natural language sentences in Italian". Expert Systems with Applications. 143 112954. Elsevier. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2019.112954. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  15. ^ a b Elia, Annibale; Pelosi, Serena; Maisto, Alessandro; Guarasci, Raffaele (2015). Towards a Lexicon-grammar based Framework for NLP: an Opinion Mining Application. RANLP. Hissar, Bulgaria. pp. 160–167. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Page 160.
  16. ^ Leclère, Christian (2005). "The lexicon-grammar of French verbs: a syntactic database". Linguistic Informatics - State of the Art and the Future. First International Conference on Linguistic Informatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. pp. 29–45. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  17. ^ a b Gross, Maurice (1984). A linguistic environment for comparative Romance syntax (PDF). XIIth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 373–446. doi:10.1075/cilt.26.26gro. ISBN 9789027235183. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Page 379.
  18. ^ Elia, Annibale (1978). "Pour un lexique-grammaire de la langue italienne. Les complétives objet". Lingvisticae Investigationes (in French). 2 (2): 233–276. doi:10.1075/li. eISSN 1569-9927. ISSN 0378-4169. Retrieved 13 April 2022. Nous avons entrepris un projet de lexique-grammaire de la langue italienne (We have undertaken a project of a lexicon-grammar of the Italian language.)
  19. ^ a b c Machonis, Peter A. (1985). "Transformations of verb phrase idioms: passivization, particle movement, dative shift". American Speech. 60 (4): 291–308. doi:10.2307/454907. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  20. ^ Elia, Annibale; Monteleone, Mario; Marano, Federica (2011). From the concept of transformation in Harris and Chomsky to the Lexique-Grammaire of Maurice Gross (PDF). 12th International Conference of the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XII). Saint-Petersburg: The Linguistic Society of Saint-Petersburg. pp. 76–82. Retrieved 4 December 2025. Pages 79-81.
  21. ^ Laporte, Eric (2015). "The Science of Linguistics". Inference: International Review of Science. 1 (2). doi:10.37282/991819.15.4.
  22. ^ Baptista, Jorge (2012). ViPEr: A Lexicon-Grammar of European Portuguese Verbs (PDF). Colloque International sur le Lexique et la Grammaire, Nové Hrady, Czech Republic. pp. 10–16. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  23. ^ Gross, Maurice (1979). "On the failure of generative grammar". Language. 55 (4): 859–885. doi:10.2307/412748. Retrieved 5 December 2025. We were forced to conclude that we could obtain no generalization without a reasonably complete study of the lexical items of the language and their syntactic uses. (...) Accumulating data (...) in all natural sciences (...) is a fundamental activity, a necessary condition for evaluating the generality of phenomena.
  24. ^ Gross, Maurice (1984). A linguistic environment for comparative Romance syntax (PDF). XIIth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Penn State University: Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 373–446. doi:10.1075/cilt.26.26gro. ISBN 9789027235183. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Pages 384-385.
  25. ^ Gross, Maurice (1988). "Methods and Tactics in the Construction of a Lexicon-Grammar" (PDF). Linguistics in the Morning Calm 2, Selected Papers. SICOL 1986. Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea: Hanshin Pub. Co. pp. 177–197. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Page 182.
  26. ^ Gross, Maurice (1994). "Constructing Lexicon-Grammars". Computational Approaches to the Lexicon. By Atkins, B.T.S.; Zampolli, A. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 213–263. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198239796.003.0008. ISBN 9780198239796. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  27. ^ a b Salkoff, Morris (1988). "Analysis by fusion" (PDF). Lingvisticae Investigationes. 12 (1). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 49–84. doi:10.1075/li.12.1.03sal. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  28. ^ a b Storrer, Angelika (2007). "Corpus-based Investigations on German Support Verb Constructions". Idioms and Collocations: Corpus-based Linguistic and Lexicographic Studies (PDF). By Fellbaum, Christiane. London / New York: Continuum. pp. 164–187. ISBN 9780826444738. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  29. ^ a b Vetulani, Zygmunt; Obrębski, Tomasz; Vetulani, Grażyna (2007). Towards a Lexicon-Grammar of Polish: Extraction of verbo-nominal collocations from corpora (PDF). International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS), Key West, United States. pp. 267–268. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  30. ^ Gross, Maurice (1984). A linguistic environment for comparative Romance syntax (PDF). XIIth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Penn State University: Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 373–446. doi:10.1075/cilt.26.26gro. ISBN 9789027235183. Retrieved 5 December 2025. Pages 385-386.
  31. ^ Fillmore, Charles (1992). "'Corpus linguistics' vs. 'Computer-aided armchair linguistics'". Directions in Corpus Linguistics. By Svartvik, Jan. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 35–60. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199292332.003.0007. ISBN 3-11-012826-8. Retrieved 5 December 2025. (Proceedings from the 1991 Nobel Symposium on Corpus Linguistics, Stockholm.)
  32. ^ "What is FrameNet?". FrameNet. Archived from the original on 2023-08-03. Retrieved 2023-09-09.
  33. ^ Kipper-Schuler, Karin; Korhonen, Anna; Ryant, Neville; Palmer, Martha (2006). Extending VerbNet with Novel Verb Classes. LREC. Genoa: ELRA. pp. 1027–1032. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
  34. ^ Gross, Maurice (2006). "État du lexique-grammaire du français et perspectives d'extension". History of the Language Sciences. By Auroux, Sylvain; Koerner, E.F.K.; Niederehe, Hand-J.; Versteegh, Kees (in French). Vol. 3. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 2122–2129. doi:10.1515/9783110167368.3. ISBN 978-3-11-016736-8. Retrieved 11 December 2025.
  35. ^ Dura, Elżbieta; Gawrońska-Szklarz, Barbara (2005). Towards Automatic Translation of Support Verbs Constructions: the Case of Polish robić/zrobić and Swedish göra (PDF). Language & Technology Conference (LTC), Poznań, Poland. pp. 450–454. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
  36. ^ Machonis, Peter (2009). "Compositional phrasal verbs with up: Direction, aspect, intensity" (PDF). Lingvisticae investigationes : International Journal of Linguistics and Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 253–264. doi:10.1075/li.32.2.08mac. Retrieved 12 December 2025.
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  44. ^ Gross, Maurice (1979). "On the failure of generative grammar". Language. 55 (4): 859–885. doi:10.2307/412748. Retrieved 12 December 2025. Footnote 6, page 865: The solution of Zellig Harris [to the analysis of] NPs like the solution of the equation by our teacher (...) directly relates the two sentences: Our teacher solved the equation. / Our teacher effected the solution of the equation. (...) The passive form enters by relativization into the NP: the solution of the equation that was effected by our teacher. By deletion of that was effected, we obtain the NP under analysis.
  45. ^ Labelle, Jacques (1974). "Le substantif symétrique". Cahier de linguistique. 5. Montréal: UQAM: 17–49.
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  55. ^ Green, Spence; de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine; Bauer, John; Manning, Christopher D. (2011). Multiword Expression Identification with Tree Substitution Grammars: A Parsing tour de force with French (PDF). Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
  56. ^ Vietri, Simonetta (2014). Idiomatic Constructions in Italian. A Lexicon-Grammar approach. Lingvisticae Investigationes Supplementa. Vol. 31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/lis.31. ISBN 9789027269300. Retrieved 11 December 2025.
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  62. ^ Laporte, Eric; Tolone, Elsa; Constant, Matthieu (2013). "Conversion of Lexicon-Grammar Tables to LMF: application to French". LMF. Lexical Markup Framework. By Francopoulo, Gil. ISTE / Wiley. pp. 157–187. doi:10.1075/lis.24. ISBN 978-1-84821-430-9. Retrieved 11 December 2025.

See also

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Selected bibliography

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