ull

        lexicom


GiLGLi

 Grupo de investigaciones léxicas y gramaticales en lengua inglesa










    

Spanish-English Core Grammar Database within the LCM

Our current research is devoted to the elaboration of a Spanish-English database for lexical and constructional structures. This research is part of the project Construcción de una base de datos léxica y construccional inglés-español en el nivel de gramática nuclear, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Reference no.  FFI2008-05035-C02-02. The research team for this project is formed by the GilGli members and Drs. Isabel González Aguiar (University of La Laguna), Francisca Plaza Picón (University of La Laguna) and Carolina Rodríguez Juárez (University of Las Palmas de Gran canaria).

The grammatical framework for this project is the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), a model of meaning construction in terms of four levels of semantic representation: a nuclear level, which includes the socalled argument structure constructions, a pragmatic level, an illocutionary level and a discourse level. Our task is to develop the internal structure of the first layer, the so called Core Grammar Level.

The Core Grammar of a language is composed of a thesaurus, or repository of lexical units with their corresponding lexical templates and a catalogue of constructions of a language —the constructicon—also endowed with a semantic description. The interaction between these two modules is determined by a set of subsumption operations and constraints. Within the context of this model,  Level 1 semantic interpretation is the result of the subsumption of (a) lexical template(s) (i.e. a low-level representation of the semantic and syntactic properties of a predicate) in a constructional template (i.e. a high-level representation of the semantic properties of a construction).

The Lexical Constructional Model- Core Grammar

 

It is the aim of our project to study core grammar or level 1 constructions in order to create an inventory and make this database contrastive between English and Spanish. The two languages show similarities but also significant differences in terms of constructional variation, something that will have to be taken into account for language teaching and translation (including automated translation) purposes. 

Our task is, therefore, twofold for each language: we need to organize a Thesaurus –or repository of lexical units- and a Constructicon –or catalogue of constructions- and also it is neccessary to estbalish the set of interface rules and restrictions that bind elements from both modules. A graphic represetation of this process could be the following:

LCM2

The Lexical Constructional Model postulates the existence of higher-level constructions with an independent status. The establishment of such higher level constructions is the task of the other research groups that form part of Lexicom.