THE LEXICON: A SYSTEM OF MATRICES OF LEXICAL UNITS AND 
THEIR PROPERTIES ~ 
Harry H. Josselson - 
Uriel Weinreich /I/~ in discussing the fact that at one 
time many American scholars relied on either the discipline 
of psychology or sociology for the resolution of semantic 
problems~ comments: 
In Soviet lexicology, it seems, neither the tra- 
ditionalists~ who have been content to work with 
the categories of classical rhetoric and 19th- 
century historical semantics~ nor the critical 
lexicologists in search of better conceptual tools, 
have ever found reason to doubt that linguistics 
alone is centrally responsible for the investiga- 
tion of the vocabulary of languages. /2/ 
This paper deals with a certain conceptual tool, the matrix, 
which linguists can use for organizing a lexicon to insure 
that words will be described (coded) with consistency, that 
is~ to insure that questions which have been asked about 
certain words will be asked for all words in the same class, 
regardless of the fact that they may be more difficult to 
answer for some than for others. The paper will also dis- 
cuss certain new categories~ beyond those of classical 
rhetoric~ which have been introduced into lexicology. 
i. INTRODUCTION 
The research in automatic translation brought about by 
the introduction of computers into the technology has 
~The research described herein has b&en supported by the In- 
formation Systems Branch of the Office of Naval Research. 
The present work is an amplification of a paper~ "The Lexicon: 
A Matri~ of Le~emes and Their Properties"~ contributed to the 
Conference on Mathematical Linguistics at Budapest-Balatonsza- 
badi, September 6-i0~ 1968. 
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engendered a change in linguistic thinking, techniques, and " 
output. The essence of this change is that vague general- 
izations cast into such phrases as 'words which have this 
general meaning are often encountered in these and similar 
structures' have been replaced by the precise definition of 
rules and the enumeration of complete sets of words defined 
by a given property. Whereas once it was acceptable to say 
(e.g., about Russian) that 'certain short forms which are 
modals tend to govern a UTO6~ clause', now it is required 
that: (a) the term 'modal' be defined, either bY criteria 
so precise that any modal could be easily identified, or if 
that is not possible, by a list containing all of the modals 
of the language, and (b) the 'certain short forms which are 
modals' which actually do govern a UTOOM clause be likewise 
identified, either by precise criteria, or by a list. 
Linguistic research into Russian has led to and will 
continue to yield many discoveries about the language, and 
the problem of recording and recalling the content of these 
discoveries is not trivial. A system is required to 
organize the information which has been ascertained, so 
that this information can be conveniently retrieved when 
it is required; such a system is realized as a lexicon. 
Fillmore /3/ has defined a lexicon as follows: 
I conceive of a lexicon as a list of minimally 
redundant descriptions of the syntactic, semantic, 
and phonological properties of lexical items, 
accompanied by a system ot redundancy rules, the 
latter conceivable as a set Of instructions on 
how to interpret the lexical entries. 
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2. DESCRIPTION OF THE LEXICON 
The steps in the construction of a lexicon may be de- 
tailed as follows: 
a) deciding which words to enter, i.e., the lexical stock 
b) deciding what are the subsets of the le×ical stock 
c) deciding what information to code about each subset 
d) compiling the information 
e) structuring the storage of the information 
where the steps outlined have interdependencies. We shall 
discuss each of the steps, especially in relation to the 
Russian language. 
a) The Lexical Stock 
Ideally a Russian lexicon should contain all of the words 
in the Russian language, but 'all Russian words' is a set 
whose contents are not universally agreed upon, since some 
words are gradually dropped from usage, while others are 
continually being formed and added to the lexical stock. The 
words to be entered in the lexicon could be obtained from 
existing sources,i.e., lexicons and technical dictionaries, 
and be supplemented by neologisms found in written works. 
The lexicographer must also be alert for new meanings and 
contexts in which 'old' words may appear. 
b) Subsets of the Lexical Stock 
The lexical stock of Russian may be subdivided into word 
classes, i.e., words having certain properties in common. 
These properties may be morphological and/or functional. In 
Russian~ nouns are not marked for tense and predicatives 
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are not marked for the property of animateness; hence they 
are in different word classes. The subsets may coincide 
with those of traditional gram_mar, or they may be different 
if the grammar to which the lexicographer refers is not the 
traditional one. 
c) Information to be Coded 
The choice of information to be coded in a particular 
lexicon is a function of its intended use--in other words, 
one should code the information that will be necessary for a 
particular purpose or set of purposes, or information that 
has a forseeable application. For example, one of the tasks 
for the Wayne State University Machine Translation group was 
to program a routine to group each nominal in a Russian sen- 
tence with its preceding (dependent) modifiers. This pro- 
cedure, called blocking, requires that the computer-stored 
lexicon contain I) word class information for identifying 
nominals and modifiers, as well as conjunctions, punctuation, 
and adverbs intervening between the modifiers, and other 
word classes, tokens of which mark the boundaries of a 
block; and 2) case, number, and gender information for esta- 
blishing an agreement relation between the nominal and the 
preceding modifiers. 
Most existing Russian lexicons contain the usual morpho- 
logical information for members of inflected word classes: 
person, gender, number, case, animation, paradigm, aspect, 
etc.. Certain syntactic information such as impersonality 
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and government of cases, prepositions, the infinitive, and 
clauses, is indicated for verbal word classes. This indica- 
tion may be explicit or sometimes only implicit in an ex- 
ample; it is not consistent. It is not unusual to chance 
upon one of the complements of a certain predicative under 
the entry head of another predicative for which the example 
is given. In the Academy of Sciences dictionary /4/, the 
entry head ~eaenm~ contains the example CTaao BApyF 06~AHO 
M AocaAHO, qTO HpMxoAMTCH MFpaT~ TaKy~ He~eny~ pooh. In the 
same lexicon~ under OOMAH~, the form OOMBHO is shown to 
govern a qTO clause in an example; however, under AocaAa 
there is neither coding nor example to indicate that ~ocanHo 
takes a qTO clause. 
Each lexical entry should include all of the existing 
phonological, morphological, and syntactic information about 
the head word; the discussion and presentation of this in- 
formation will entail the introduction of concepts from 
semantics and stylistics. When using a Russian lexicon, one 
should be able to discover whether ~OmHO is a modal (if the 
grammar of Russian uses the concept 'modal' for the word 
class of which MO~HO is a member) by looking under the entry 
head MOXHO and finding the position where the property 'modal' 
is coded for that word. Furthermore, one should be able to 
determine whether MOXHO takes an infinitive complement, 
i 
whether if takes a subject, or whether if has a corresponding 
long form, etc.. 
Since the predicate is the sentence fulcrum, i.e., since 
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it contains the most information necessary for analysis of 
the structure of the sentence, the coding of the complements 
of predicative words is one of the main tasks for the data 
input to automatic parsing of Russian sentences. Machine 
translation oriented lexicographers have done a great deal 
of work in coding the complements of many lexemes, especially 
the predicatives, in an explicit and thorough way. 
lordanskaja /5/ suggested 126 different complementation 
patterns to account for the "strong government" of 7000 
Russian stems. She recognized that the meanings of the stems 
could be associated with different patterns; e.g., exe~oBaTb 
has the following meanings with the following complements: 
i) 'to go after' with 3a + instr. 
2) 'to ensue' with H3 + gen. 
3) 'to be guided by something' with dative without prep. 
She recommended that the stems with different meanings be 
treated as different, and that a model be composed separately 
for each item. 
Rakhmankulova /6/ has written 12 models of complements 
for sentences containing any of ten different German verbs 
denoting position in space, and she illustrates, in a 
matrix, which verbs can appear in which models. 
Machine translation groups have examined Russian texts 
and from them compiled lists of nominals and predicatives 
which take an infinitive complement or a ~TO or qTOdH clause 
complement~ and lists, of governing modifiers with their 
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complementary structures~ many of which are not shown in 
any lexicon. The Wayne State University group has done 
extensive coding of the complementation of predicatives 
(verbs and short form modifiers), modifiers (participles 
and adjectives which govern complementary structures), 
and nouns. The group has created an auxiliary dictionary 
which is structured so that every complementation pattern 
(where the pattern includes an indication of the optional 
presence or obligatory absence of a subject) associated 
with each predicative in the dictionary is written out ex- 
plicitly. For example, the entry for noTpe0OBaTB in this 
auxiliary dictionary reads as follows: 
CAN SUBJECT 
PATTERN (NOM. CASE) 
NUMBER BE PRESENT? 
yes 
yes 
yes 
yes 
yes 
yes 
yes 
NOMINAL INF. 
1 2 3 
ace 
gen 
gen 
gen 
gen 
PREP+CASE CLAUSE 
1 2 qTO qT05~ 
E+dat 
~o+gen 
O+gen 
yes 
yes 
For translation purposes, it will be necessary to indicate 
the translation(s) of the predicativ~ corresponding to each 
pattern, as well as those of the prepositions and case 
endings in each pattern. A language example of pattern 3 
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is Yxe oKo~o HO~y~HS eFo HoTpe6oBa~M K OKO~OTOqHO~o -'AI- 
ready around midday they summoned him %0 the police.', 
while pattern 4 is illustrated by OT ~McaTeaH M~ noTpe~yeM 
Y.y~oxecTBeHHOR npaB~. -'Of a writer we shall 
artistic truth.' 
The above entry may not be complete. For instance, i% 
does not show the entry y+gen which reflects a phrase in 
Smirnitsky's dictionary /7/, Tpe6oBaT5 O6%SCHeHMS y KOF0 -- 'to 
demand an explanation from somebody', which is not shown in 
three Russian lexicons /8/. Furthermore, i% can be seen 
that the patterns with K+da% can be extended so that that 
phrase is replaced by B+aCC or even by an adverbial ~OMOR 
-'home'. New information will always be added. 
One transformationalist technique is to specify a syn- 
tactic construction along with a list of (all of the) lexemes 
which can occur in a certain position of that construction. 
The set of lexemes which Can be tokens in a certain position 
of a construction is the domain of that construction with 
respect to the position. Once a. lexeme is in that domains- 
the pair consisting of the position and the construction 
becomes par% of the definition of that lexeme. The lexeme 
is completely defined by all of the pairs in which it is a 
token, and ideally the contents of a lexical entry would in- 
clude all such pairs. 
Fillmore /9/ has compiled a list of English verbs which 
take a to-phrase complement, i.e. le~emes which occur in the 
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position VERB of the construction SUBJ + VERB + to-phrase. 
He is careful to point out that the to-phrase must function 
as the complement of the verbs on the list (e.g., agree, 
endeavor, hope, want) and not as a purposive adverbial phrase 
(as with.'wait' in 'He waited to see her.' where 'to' can 
be replaced by 'in order to'), since as he states,"The 
appearance of purpose adverbial to-phrases.., does not 
appear to be statable in terms of contextual verb type."/10/ 
This indicates that the formal construction is not always 
sufficient to define a property, and that the deep structure 
function of the construction may have to be specified as 
well. 
The fact that statements which are formally identical 
can have distinct deep structures is illustrated by the 
following Russian language examples, which are not only 
formally identical, but identical in content except for one 
word: 
N~TB qe~oBe~ 6H~o BH0paHo HaMM. 
Five persons were elected by us. 
N~TB qeaoBe~ 6~o B~OpaHo ~eaeFaTaMM. 
Five persons were elected as delegates/by the delegates. 
BSTB qe~oBeE 6N~o BH6paHo pe~epeH~yMoM. 
Five persons were elected by referendum. 
In the first example, the (pro)noun in the instrumental 
case is the subject of the active transform 
i 
MM BHOpaaM HHTB qeaoBeK. 
We elected five persons. 
while in the second example, first interpretation, the in- 
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strumental noun remains in the instrumental case in the 
active transform, where (X) stands for some subject: 
(X) B~paaM n~T~ qea0BeK ~eaeFaTa~M. 
(X) elected five people as delegates. 
The instrumental noun in the third sentence also remains in 
the instrumental case in the active transform, but is shown 
to have a different function from the noun in the second 
sentence by the fact that it is possible, albeit not ele- 
gant, to say 
NHT5 ueaoBeE ONao BNOpaHo ~eaeraTaMM peCepeH~yMoM. 
Five people were elected as delegates by referendum. 
and correspondingly 
(X) BH~paaM nSTb qeaoBeK ~eaeFaTaMM pe~epeH~yMOM." 
(X) elected five people as delegates by referendum., 
i.e. both words can coexist in a sentence. 
Kiefer /i\]/ has shown for Hungarian that the meaning of 
the verb can change within a given construction when the 
definition of the construction is formal and does not con- 
sider semantic properties of the components. 
Penz van nala. 
He has money on him. 
is contrasted with 
I Peter van n~la. 
Peter is with him. 
where the animate status of the subject distinguishes the 
possessive and locational meanings. 
Lehiste /12/ has shown that the distinction between 
'being' and 'having' in Estonian is one of different comple- 
ments taken, under special conditions, by the same verb. 
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Although 
Isa~ on raamat. 
Father has (a) book. 
and 
Laual on raamat. 
On the table is (a) book. 
are structurally identical, since morphologically isal and 
laual are both in the adessive case and raamat is in the 
nominative case, when functional (semantic) case names 
are used, isal is dative and laual is locative, while 
raama___.___~t is in both sentences in the objective case. 
As researchers work in the area of discovering and 
codifying syntactic properties, they find out that semantic 
considerations are impossible to avoid. Much of the new 
work in lexieology involves the analysis of predicates and 
their arguments (i.e., subjects, and complements such as 
clauses, noun/adjective phrases, and prepositional phrases). 
The transition from purely syntactic coding (i.e., specifying 
the complements and their morphological cases if applicable) 
to semantic coding has been made by Fillmore /13/ with his 
grammatical cases (e.g., agent, instrument, object). 
d) Compiling the Information 
Compiling a dictionary entails discovering facts about 
a language and arranging these facts in such a way that they 
may be conveniently retrieved. The ,key factor is that once 
a statement is made about a certain member of a word Class, 
all the other menbers of that class must be coded for the 
way that statement applies to them. If the statement is 
"% 
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¥ 
irrelevant for certain members, it may be desirable to create 
a new word class for the latter. 
A lexicon without lacunae can be compiled by the following 
procedure: For each word class construct a matrix such that 
each column head is a bit of information pertinent to this 
class, and the row heads are all of the words in this class. 
Each intersection must be filled with some code indicating 
whether or not the word has the property, and the codes of 
the properties must be such that they allow the entire spec- 
trma of possible answers. For example, since the Russian 
CHpoxa - 'orphan' - can be feminine or masculine, the gender 
code must include also combinations of the basic components 
(masculine, feminine, and neuter); since the Russian 
~Hdx~epe~HposaTb --' to differentiate' - is both perfective 
and imperfective, the code for aspect must comprise entries 
for 'perfective', 'imperfective', and 'both'. When a verb 
is marked 'both', it may be desirable to specify the dis- 
tribution of the aspects over meaning and/or tenses. 
This matrix format forces the lexicographer to commit 
himself about the way each property applies to each member 
of the word class. It precludes the old-fashioned quasi- 
coding, where the lexicographer coded what he knew and 
omitted what he did not know or had never thought to con- 
sider. In some Russian lexicons, certain nouns were coded for 
having no plural, but the absence of this coding in other 
entries did not necessarily imply that they did have a 
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plural; the only inference that could be drawn was that 
most nouns not coded for having no plural did indeed have 
one, but this information is not meaningful when definite 
information about a particular entry is required. 
When using the matrix format, with its demands for con- 
sistency, one faces the problem of how to get the information 
to fill its intersections. Naturally, if the information 
is already in a dictionary, or if the lexicographer has an 
example, from some text, of the phenomenon to be coded, there 
is no problem in filling the intersection. However, if the 
example is lacking, this is not always sufficient ground for 
coding the non-existence of the property. Sometimes~ de- 
spite the absence of an example, the lexicographer feels that 
the property holds, and he may consult with a native informant, 
using the caution offered by Zellig Harris /14/: 
If the linguist has in his corpus ax, bx, but 
not cx (where a, b, c are elements with general 
distributional similarity)9 he may wish to check 
with the informant as to whether cx occurs at all. 
The eliciting of forms from an informant has to 
be planned with care because of suggestibility 
in certain interpersonal and intercultural re- 
lations and because it may not always be possible 
for the informant to say whether a form which 
is proposed by the linguist occurs in his language. 
Rather than constructing a form cx and asking 
the informant 'Do you say cx?' or the like, the 
linguist can in most cases ask questions which 
should lead the informant to use cx if the form 
occurs in the informant's speech. At its most 
innocent, eliciting consists of devising situa- 
tions in which the form in question is likely 
to occur in the informant's speech. 
Work at Wayne State University on the complementation 
of certain Russian -o forms by qTO/qTOO~ clauses /15/ sup- 
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ports Harris' observation. The difficulties of working with 
a native informant became evident when, on different occasions 
the native accepted and then rejected certain constructions. 
Sometimes the acceptance depended on the construction of 
contexts which eluded the native on the second perusal. 
The matrix approach is currently being used in Russian 
lexicon research at Wayne State University, Where the inform- 
ation in the Academy dictionary /16/ and in Ushakov /17/ 
is being coded. ~ The omissions and inconsistencies of 
presenting lexical information in the lexicons are discussed 
in a paper by Alexander Vitek /18/. Grammatical profiles 
have been produced for all Russian substantives, adjectives, 
and verbs, including their derivative participles and 
gerunds. The profiles contain primarily morphological 
properties, but some syntactic coding, mainly of comple- 
mentation patterns, has also been started. 
A sample of the coding format developed for Russian verbs 
(in Ushakov) in this research appears in Figures 1 and 2. 
In Figure I, the coding form for Russian verb morpho- 
logy, separate fields are denoted by a single slash mark. 
Each field has codes for certain morphological properties 
of the Russian verb. The following chart explains the codes 
for the verb ~OOHT~ - 'to obtain', which appears on the first 
line of Figure i. 
This work is supported by a grant from the National Science 
Foundat ion. 
-14- 
i I" 
I i. i 
I 
e~.e i 
, I • i ,. i ! 
i~ ~ .~ ~ 
~ i~ ~ ~; ~. 
i i 
, i i 
' " !! 
; . l I i I ;! 
3 " ! ! I ' .I -!! 
i I -I I 
i 
i 
N 
-I.5- 
Morphology Code for0S~q~_~ 
Field Code Meanin~ 
1 0210 Perfective aspect in all meanings; there exists 
a single counterpart verb (i.e., of imperfective 
aspect); subaspect (i.e., iterative/non- 
iterative) does not apply. 
2 Ii First conjugation verb: Ist person singular 
ends in -~; 3rd person plural ends in -VT. 
3 200 Stress is fixed on the stem throughout the 
conjugation; there are no alternate stress 
patterns. 
4 0000 No changes occur in the stem in the present 
tense conjugation. 
5 99 LIST TYPe: -T___B_B is dropped, and 6_~- is replaced 
by 6yA-. 
6 OOOO There are no consonantal mutations. 
7 O0 There are no restrictions in usage of present 
and future tense. 
8 00 Regular past tense marker: drop -T5 and add 
-JIto stem. 
g 7000 Stress is on stem in all past tense forms ex- 
cept the feminine where it is on the ending. 
i0 OO There are no restrictions in usage of past 
tense. 
In Figure 2, the coding form for Russian verb government, 
separate fields are denoted by double slash marks, with single 
slash marks used for separation within a given field. The 
codes are explained once again with the verb ~O6~TB - 'to 
obtain', which appears on the first coding l~ne. 
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I 
.1 
-J .! 
"i 
"i 
"i 
_~. • 
.~ • : 
<,. : 
~ : 
. . 
!" "i : • .L , 
" " '1 
't r 
i i 
• c t " 
.I . 
Z u w~-i,o • , • 
,~- .,: -~. I I 
.,: ~ o..~ o~ ~ '., ! c', '- 
: ; i~ ~ ., 
..... !_~'t "\[ i i 
: u. ~ I 
w . < .,,o I,- l.al w ~ :l... ~ .I- 
0c o o o 
• ; ,~ • ,~. • 
": i ~: " ~. ' :~ ",,:: • ~ • 
.' ~ :'J~< . 
• ~" "i'~ " 
? ~ I',~ ' 
.i " "-:" ~ I ~ ' .~ ~. ~,~ ' ,~, • 
; I ',:'~' I' I:~ ' 
'i ;" ~r • ..~ • 
~i :" ~ " ~ • 
~"" ~" " l" ~' ' 
.. ,.--I~.' ~ i,~ ;~1 
~! ~., ~: ~1~ I ~, I ~'~ ~ I~. ~ t,~::~: ~:~, I 
~ i~.~ ~ I~ ' ~i 
i .1" ':',' ! ', i / 
.... I,,/,.. ./ 
:I 
J 
< w ,0 ~.- L', . . 
~ ~ " '~ o o o 
..... I= N N N N ~ N N ~ ~ N 
• °1 
• !o 
• "' I~ 
• 18 
. .i I~ I 
\[~ 
f 
) 
). 
.~- T' 
~ :c I 
- I 
o .~. i 
i- I 
I . 
-17- 
Government Cod__.~e for ~ObblTb 
Field Code Meanin~ 
1 02110 This entry has two Arabic numeral divisions 
in the lexicon; a general government marker 
precedes the first Arabic numeral; there 
are language examples given in the lexicon; 
the entry is not a -cA verb. 
2 AA The general government marker indicated 
above is the accusative case - KOFO/qTO. 
3 O0 There is no government indicated under Arabic 
numeral #i. 
4 O0 There is no government indicated under Arabic 
numeral #2. 
5 R1 The entry contains a cross-reference to some 
other verb. 
e) Structuring the Storage of the Information 
There are many ways of storing the words of a language. 
With respect to sequencing, alphabetical order is the most 
popular method, although reverse dictionaries exist, and 
dictionaries where words are sequenced by their length and 
only alphabetized within a given word length, or where word 
class is the primary division, are conceivable. With respect 
to the entry heads, they can be stems, canonical forms, or 
all of the forms that exist in the language. Note that a 
canonical form could be a particular form of a paradigm 
such as the masculine singular form of an adjective or the 
infinitive form of a verb, or it could be a certain verb 
from which other verbs are derived by certain rules. Binnick 
/19/ has illustrated the latter by suggesting that be could 
be an entry head having, as part of its contents, ~ and 
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make which are the causative forms of the locational and 
existential meanings, respectively, of be. Fillmore /20/ 
has mentioned that strike and touch differ primarily only 
in relative intensity of impact. It is interesting to 
note that Hebrew has for some verbs a basic form which is 
Conjugated through seven 'constructions', two of which are 
labeled 'causative' and 'intensive'. 
A lexicon whose entry heads are stems or canonical 
forms has the advantage of compactness and the advantage 
that the whole paradigm associated with these forms is in- 
I 
dicated. It has the disadvantage that the user must know 
the rules of derivation in order to look up words which are 
not in canonical form. If every form in the language is an 
entry head, then the lexicon is much longer, but the homo- 
graphic properties of the word are conveniently recorded; 
one might never realize, using a canonical for lexicon, that 
cea is both the past tense of OeCT~ - 'to sit down' - and 
the genitive plural of ce~o - 'village' -~ but this property 
would be immediately evident if tea were an entry head. 
In the Wayne State University machine translation re- 
search, Russian text to be translated or analyzed is 'read 
in' one sentence at a time; starting from left to right, 
segments of the sentence are 'looked up' in order to obtain 
whatever information about them has been stdred in the machine 
translation lexicon. The minimum segment is one word; the 
maximum segment is an entire sentence~ no segment is fermi- 
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nated inside a ~ord. The entry heads of the lexicon were 
designed to correspond to the segments, and therefore are 
~rds or sequences of words (idioms). The entry heads could 
be canonical forms or stems, but this would require automatic 
procedures for transforming any inflected form into its 
canonical form, and for finding the stem of any form in text. 
Space can be saved in a full form lexicon by entering only 
once~ perhaps under the canonical form, the information 
which all members of a paradigm share 9 and cross referencing 
this information under the related entry heads. In the 
Wayne State University machine translation research~ sets 
of complementation patterns are stored in an auxiliary 
dictionary and any set can be referenced by any verbal form. 
The sequence of entry heads in the lexicon is alphabetical, 
since the shape of the text word to be looked up is its only 
identification. Naturally, if the set of Russian words could 
be put into a one-to-one correspondence with some subset of 
the positive integers by a function whose value on any word 
in its domain could be determined only by information de- 
ducible from the graphemic structure of that word~ then the 
entry heads of the lexicon would not have to be in alphabetic 
i 
order; in this case, the lookup would be simpler and faster, 
since the entries could be randomly accessed. 
The number of columns in the matrix of any word class 
should be without limit so that new information can be en- 
tered. Similarly, the number of rows should be without 
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limit to allow additions as the lexical stock of the lan- 
guage grows. 
3. coNCLusION 
Lexical information is the consummation and thereby also 
the obviation of research through grammars and articles which 
discuss certain questions and present a few examples of lexi- 
cal items which have certain properties. A lexicon must 
reflect the grammatical system used to describe the language~ 
and i% should carry the system through to every lexical item 
in the language. It is clear that the matrix format is the 
only one which will insure consistency and completeness. 
This format is eminently machinable and thereby convenient 
for the retrieval of lists of all words in the language 
which have a certain property. 
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REFERENCES 

Uriel Weinreich, "Lexicology", Current Trends in 
Linguistics: Vol. i, Soviet and East European, 
University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1963. 

Charles J. Fillmore, "Lexical Entries for Verbs", 
~ Pa~ i__n_n Linguistics, No. 2, Computer and 
Information Science Research Center, The Ohio State 
University, Columbus, Ohio, November 1968, pp. 23-24. 

COBPEMEHHOFO PY~C~OFO ~HTEPATYPHOFO ~3~KA 
(Dictionary of the Contemporary Russian Literary 
Language), Academy of Sciences, Moscow-Leningrad, 17 
volumes, 1963. 

~.H. HOP~AHCKA~, ~BA OREPATOPA OBPABOTKH C~OBO- 
CONETAHH~ C "CH~bH~M YNPAB~EHHEM", AKA~EMH~ HAYK CCCP, 
HHCTHTYT ~3~KO3HAHH~, MOCKBA, 1961. 

H.C. PAXMAHKY~OBA, "O MO~E~X RPE~O~EHH~ OBPA3YEM~X 
O~HO~ CEMAHTHqECKO~ FPYNRO~ F~AFO~OB", HHOCTP~HH~E 
~3~KH B WKO~E, NO. 6, 1968. 

A.I. Smirnitsky, Russian-English Dictionary , 6th ed. 
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1959). 

Academy dictionary, Op. ci_~t., 

C~OBAPb PYCCKOFO ~3~KA (Dictionary of the Russian 
Language), Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 4 volumes, 
1957-1961. 

D.N. Ushakov, TO~KOB~H C~OBAPb PYCCKO\[O S3~KA (Lexicon 
of the Russian Language), Moscow, 4 volumes, 1935-1940. 

Charles J. Fillmore, "Desentential Complement Verbs in 
English", Project on Linguistic Analysis, Report No. 7, 
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, pp. 88-105. 


Ferenc Kiefer, "On the Structure of Lexicon", Interim 
Report No. 7, Research Group for Quantitative Linguis- 
tics, KVAL, Stockholm, February 1968, p. 5. 

llse Lehiste, "'Being' and IHaving' in Estonian", 
WorkinK Pa__apers in Linguistics, No. 2, Computer and 
Information Science Research Center, The Ohio State 
University, Columbus, Ohio, November 1968, pp. 104-128. 

Charles J. Fillmore, "Toward a Modern Theory of Case", 
RF Project 1685-6, The Ohio State University Research 
Foundation, Columbus, Ohio, August 1966. 

gellig S. Harris, Structural Lin~ulstics, University of 
Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 1951, p. 12. 

Amelia J. Steiger and Sidney Simon, Observations on the 
Complementatio n of Some -O Forms b. Z qTO/qTOSN Clauses, 
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1968. 

4 volume Academy Dictionary, Op. ci___!, in Footnote 8. 

Alexander Vitek, "Grammar and Lexicons: The Word Class 
of Adverbs in Russian Lexicons", Cahiers de Lexicologie, 
Didier-Larousse, Paris, Vol. 12, 1968-1. 

Robert I. Binnick, "The Characterization of Abstract 
Lexical Entries", paper presented at the Sixth Annual 
Meeting of the Association for Machine Translation 
and Computatlonal Linguistics, University of Illinois, 
Urbana, Illinois, July 24-25, 1968.
