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<Paper uid="P84-1010">
  <Title>DENORMALIZATION AND CROSS REFERENCING IN THEORETICAL LEXICOGRAPHY</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="38" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
I LEXICOGRAPHY
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Natural language dictionaries seem like obvious candidates for information management in data base form, at least until you try to do one. Then it appears as if the better the dictionary in terms of lexicographic theory, the more awkward it is to fit relational constraints. Vest pocket tourist dictionaries are a snap; Webster's Collegiate and parser dictionaries require careful thought; the Mel'chuk style of explanatory-combinatory dictionary forces us out of the strategies that work on ordinary data bases.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In designing a tool to manage lexicographic field work under the constraints of Mel'chuk's meaning-text model, the most fully specified one available for detailed lexicography, I laid down specifications in four areas. First, it must handle all lexical correlates of the head word. Lexical correlates relate to the head in ways that have numerous parallels within the language. In English, for example, we have nouns that denote the doer of an action. Some, such as driver, writer, builder, are morphologically transparent.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Others like pilot (from fly) and cook (from cook) are not; yet they relate to the corresponding verbs in the same way as the transparent ones do. Mel'chuk and associates have identified about fifty such types, or lexical functions, of which S_, the habitual first substantive Just illustrated, is one.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> These types appear to have analogous meanings in different languages, though not all types are necessarily used in every language, and the relative popularity of each differs from one language to another, as does the extent to which each is grammaticalized. For example, English has a rich vocabulary of values for a relation called Ma~n (from Latin magnus) that denotes the superlative degree of its argument: Magn (sit) = ti6ht, Magn (black) =Jet, pitch, coal, Magn (left) = hard, Magn---~ay) = for all you're worth, and on and on. On the other hand Huichol, a Uto-Aztecan language of Mexico I have been working on since 1952, has no such vocabulary; it uses the simple intensives yeme and va~c~a for all this, and2picks up its lexical richness in other areas.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Second, a theoretically sound definition uses words that are themselves defined through as long a chain as possible back to zero level words that can be defined only in one of two ways: by accepting that some definitions -- as few as possible -may be circular, or by defining the zero level via extralinguistic experiences. Some dictionaries define sweet circularly in terms of sugar and vice versa; but one could also begin by passing the sugar bowl and thus break the circularity. The tool must help trace the use of defining words.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Third, the arguments in the semantic representation of a word have to relate explicitly to grammatical elements like subjects and objects and possessors: his projection of the budget and  high back unrounded, ' glottal stop, * high tone, W long syllable, ~ rhythm break, ~ voiced retroflex alveopalatal fricative, ~ retroflex flap, cuV labiovelar stop.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  please turn out the li6ht each involve two arguments to the main operative word (him and budget, you and li6ht), but the relationship is handled in different grammatical frames.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Finally, the tool must run on the smallest, most portable machine available, if necessary trading processing time for memory and external space.</Paragraph>
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