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Wordhord- A lexical and Constructional database of Anglo-Saxon verbs

 

 

We have been working extensively on the development of a lexical and constructional database of the Anglo-Saxon Verbal lexicon. This has been the main topic for the following research projects:

 -  Arquitectura semántica y catálogo de construcciones sintáctico-semánticas del inglés  antiguo,

           Reference no. HUM2005-07651-C02-01(Spanish Ministry of Education;             2005-2008)

    -   Gramática y mecanismos de interficie de las clases léxicas verbales del inglés  antiguo.

     Reference no. BFF 2002-00659 (Spanish Ministry of Science and      Technology; 2002-2005)

- Diccionario nuclear sintáctico de base semántica del léxico en inglés antiguo.

    Reference no. PI 1999/7136 (Canary Islands Regional Government;             1999-2002)

 
The primary goal of our research has been the elaboration of a syntagmatic dictionary of Old English verbs based on semantic domains. Such a dictionary would present lexical units organized in semantic domains, structured, in turn, in semantic subdomains. Given the restrictions imposed by a historical language, syntactic information has been  a fundamental element in the organization of lexical hierarchies. The principles for lexical organization proposed by the Functional Lexematic Model (Faber and Mairal 1999) motivated the methodology adopted and set the foundations for the design of lexical domain-based grammars. This aimed at providing English historical linguistics with valuable tools for a better understanding of the syntax and morphology of Old English  from an innovating perspective.

One of the most serious gaps in the dictionaries of Old English concerns the overt coding of syntactic features. That is, lexicographical products for this period tell us almost nothing about the following:

          - the syntactic patterns associated to each lexical entry.

                  -  why a set of semantically related predicates show a set of systematic syntactic                        structures and alternations.

                -  the extent to which syntactic behavior can be predicted from the semantic domain                  the lexeme is subsumed.

                -  the extent to which syntactic behavior predicts morphological marking.

 
Our purpose was to deal with these issues as major objectives to be developed by our Functional Lexematic Old English Dictionary (FLOED) aims to develop.

For this task, Lexematic theory was applied, by means of which the organization and structure of domains (the so-called architecture of the lexicon) is arrived at by a bottom-up procedure: lexical domains and subdomains are constructed by paying attention to the definitional structure of lexical units; its more outstanding difference with other thesaurical approaches lies in the fact of not establishing a priori conceptual areas in which to later fit lexical units.It is the definition of words that would tell how the lexicon of a language organizes itself in relational structures. Each definition consists of a genus, or area of meaning shared by a group of lexemes, and of a (set of) specific differentiating feature(s), which establish the set of functional oppositions by which every word locates itself in the overall structure of (sub) domains. From this approach follows a methodological corollary: the need to establish categorial distinctions. Oppositions of meaning are sensitive to the lexical category of units and, therefore, an initial structuring of domains would separate verbal from nominal and adjectival predicates (see Faber and Mairal, 1999: chapter 3).

      However, the search for paradigmatic information in historical lexica is necessarily restricted in scope: it does not seem plausible to reach the same level of specificity in the semantic decomposition of lexical meaning. In order to avoid this problem, the FLOED proposes to take an alternative path, that is, instead of using information stemming from definitions as a unique source to fix lexical membership into a domain, will use the semantic information provided by dictionaries as a first tool for a preliminary characterization of domains. In order to overcome this drawback, syntactic information - the whole set of structures and variations lexemes subcategorize for - would be criterial for the establishment of lexical hierarchies. One of the fundamental pillars behind the FLOED is to provide lexical units with the full range of syntactic parameters which operate both within a lexical entry and, moreover, within a single subdomain.

In this connection, we hypothesized that the Lexical Iconicity Principle which governs the interface between semantics and syntax in a subdomain could serve as a guiding principle to strengthen the semantic configuration of domains (cf. Cortés and Mairal 2002). Then, the next step consists of reinterpreting this principle along the following lines:

 

The greater the syntactic coverage of a lexical unit, the higher its position in the semantic hierarchy within a given subdomain

 

This new interpretation, provisionally termed the “Lexical Iconicity Principle - Beta Reading”  introduces a reorganization of both the semantic and the syntactic component in the sense that it is now syntax that determines the semantic space and location in a subdomain. In other words, the following corollaries are put forward:

 

1.       syntactic information comes to play a more prominent role than has hitherto been assigned since it compensates for the shortcomings of a semantic analysis.

2.       syntactic patterning would allow us to articulate not only configurational structure within domains but also to assign verbal predicates to lexical classes. The construction of lexical templates will become a fundamental tool to motivate syntactic and morphological phenomena.

 

The outcome of this methodological underpinnings has been the classification of about five thousands lemmas in 13 lexical domains: Possession, Action, Perception, Movement, Change, Light, Cognition, Contact, Sound, Feeling, Speech, Position and Existence. Each of these domains is hierarchically arranged into a number of subdomains of different specificity levels, a shown in the following scale:

            Subdomains:          50

                        Sub-Subdomains Level 1: 129

                                   Sub-Subdomains Level 2: 119

                                               Sub-Subdomains Level 3:   51

                                                           Sub-Subdomains Level 4:   11

                                                                                   Lexical units:  c. 5500

 

 The paradigmatic information has been transferred into a Microsoft Access Database named  WORDHORD with the following general structure:

With regard to the encoding of syntagmatic features, we have identified the alternations and constructions corresponding to the lexical units of the domains of Speech, Sound, Contact and Light, and there are also extensive analysis of some of the subdomains of Movement, Feeling, Action, Change and Existence. The format of  a WORDHORD  lexical entry is as follows:  

And a constructional entry would look like the following:

WORDHORD allows for different searches, from domain to unit: 

and from unit to domain, as shown in the following: