4.4.2 The Lexicon

The general format of the lexical entries.

Our lexicon declaratively lists information about the words belonging to most syntactic categories in a very basic form. Technically, it consists of a lot of lexicon/4-facts. Thus the general format of a lexical entry is:

lexicon(Cat,Sem,Phrase,Misc).

Here Cat is the syntactic category, Sem the core semantic information introduced by the phrase (normally a relation symbol or a constant), Phrase the string of words that span the phrase, and Misc miscellaneous information depending on the type of entry. In particular, Misc may list gender information for nouns, proper names and inflectional information for verbs, etc.

Typical entries for intransitive verbs are:

lexicon(pro,nonhuman,[it],[]).

lexicon(pro,male,[him],[]).

lexicon(iv,purr,[purr],inf).

lexicon(iv,smoke,[smokes],fin).

Nouns are listed in the following format:

lexicon(noun,woman,[woman],[]).

lexicon(noun,siamesecat,[siamese,cat],[]).

englishLexicon.pl: View Download

A complete list of our lexical rules is to be found in the file englishLexicon.pl. All these rules will work for us unchanged throughout the course.