Lexicon-Grammar is a method and a praxis of formalized description of human languages. It was developed by

Maurice Gross Maurice Gross (born 21 July 1934 in Sedan, Ardennes; died 8 December 2001 in Paris) was a French linguistJean-Claude Chevalier,, ''Le Monde'', 12 décembre 2001. and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-G ...

since the end of the 1960s. Its theoretical basis is Zellig S. Harris's

distributionalism Distributionalism was a general theory of language and a discovery procedure for establishing elements and structures of language based on observed usage. The purpose of distributionalism was to provide a scientific basis for syntax as independent ...

, and notably the notion of

transformational grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) was the earliest model of grammar proposed within the research tradition of generative grammar. Like current generative theories, it treated grammar as a sys ...

. The notation conventions are meant to be as clear and comprehensible as possible. The method of Lexicon-Grammar is inspired from

hard sciences Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity. In general, the formal sciences and natural sciences are considered ''hard science'' ...

. It focuses on

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

collection, hence on real use of

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Lexicon-grammar also requires formalization. The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to allow an application to

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a String (computer science), string of Symbol (formal), symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal gramm ...

, in particular through the realization of syntax analyzers. The formal model is such that the results of the description take the form of double-entry tables, also called ''matrixes''. Lexicon-grammar tables code lexical entries together with their syntaxico-semantic properties. As a result, they formalize syntaxico-semantic information.

Theoretical basis

The theoretical basis of Lexicon-grammar is Zellig Harris'

, and in particular the notion of transformation in the sense of Zellig Harris. In fact,

was a student of Zellig Harris. 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 the directly observable "surface"; it is a difference from

Generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

, which normally uses abstract structures such as deep structures.

Fact collection

Lexicon-grammatical method is inspired by

experimental science An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

. It emphasizes the collection of facts, and thus the confrontation with the reality of language use, from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. Quantitatively: a lexicon-grammar includes a program of systematic description of the lexicon. 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 denounced as a dead end. This is different from

generative grammar, which values the notion of generalization. Qualitatively: methodological precautions are applied to ensure good

reproducibility Reproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or ...

of the 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 syntaxico-semantic properties could be considered as defined with sufficient precision to make sense to compare them with 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 more and more easily the use of attested examples in corpora. This new precaution has simply been added to the previous ones, making the lexicon-grammatical method a method that belongs to both introspective linguistics and 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 formalization. The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to allow for : - a verification by comparison with the reality of language use; - an application to the automatic processing of languages, and more particularly to deep linguistic processing, in particular through the development of syntax analysers by computer scientists.

References

{{Reflist

Theoretical basis

Fact collection

Formalisation

References

See also

External links

Selected bibliography