Lexicon-grammar
Open-knowledge reference entry
Lexicon-Grammar is a method and a praxis of formalized description of human languages, which considers that the systematic investigation of lexical entries is presently the main challenge of the scientific study of languages. The development of Lexicon-Grammar began in the late 1960s under Maurice Gross.
Its theoretical basis is Zellig S. Harris's distributionalism, and notably the notion of transformational rule. The notational conventions are meant to be as clear and comprehensible as possible.
The method of Lexicon-Grammar is inspired from hard sciences. It focuses on data collection, hence on the real use of language, both from a quantitative and observational point of view.
Lexicon-grammar also requires formalisation. The results of the description must be sufficiently formal to be usable for natural language processing, in particular through the development of parsers. The information model is such that the results of the description take the form of two-dimensional tables, also called matrices, which cross-tabulate entries with syntactic-semantic properties. As a result, the Lexicon-grammar addresses "the problem of correlations between syntax and the lexicon."
Experiments showed that several researchers or teams can make their observations cumulative.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1649163. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lexicon-grammar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.