Explanatory and Combinatorial Dictionary of Contemporary French (ECDCF)
Overview
The Explanatory-Combinatorial Dictionary of Contemporary French (ECDCF) — in French, Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire du français contemporain (DECFC) — is the result of a research aiming at a semantically-geared, formal description of the French lexicon. Is has been developped according to the principles of the explanatory-combinatorial lexicology — see Mel’čuk, Clas & Polguère (1995) — set forth within the framework of the Meaning-Text theory. Essentially, the ECDCF is a synthesis-oriented dictionary: it strives to present, in a coherent and systematic way, all relevant information needed by speakers in order to produce linguistically correct expressions of any meaning they may wish to communicate. More specifically, the ECDCF provides, for each lexical unit, an exhaustive description of its relevant semantic, syntactic, morphological and restricted lexical cooccurrence properties.Each lexical unit is described in the ECDCF in a separate entry, containing the following ten zones:
- introductory zone (the name of the lexical unit, its spelling variants);
- phonological zone (pronunciation, particular prosody associated with the unit);
- morphological zone (part of speech, declension or conjugation type, irregular forms of the unit, etc);
- stylistic zone (usage labels);
- semantic zone (definition and connotations of the unit);
- syntactic zone (government pattern, restrictions on the cooccurrence of arguments of the unit);
- restricted lexical cooccurence zone (idiosyncratic combinatorial properties of the unit);
- examples;
- phraseology;
- informal comments (pragmatic and/or culture-specific information relevant for the proper use of the unit, justifications for semantic components included in its definiton, etc).
To this day, four volumes of the ECDCF have been published: Mel’čuk et al. (1984, 1988, 1992, 1999). Each volume of the ECDCF contains two sub-divisions: a theoretical part, expounding/exemplifying the underlying principles of lexicographic description, and a descriptive part, where the actual descriptions of French lexical units can be found.
The four existing volumes of the ECDCF contain descriptions of 510 vocables (polysemous words) of French. The selection of lexical units described has been made as variegated as possible: it features monolexemic/multlexemic lexical units belonging to different semantic/part-of-speech classes. This choice has been guided by the wish to test, in hard experimental conditions, the overall theoretical and methodological validity of the approach. For the purposes of description, lexical units are grouped into lexical and semantic fields. However, in order to allow for a more convenient consultation, the vocables in the actual ECDCF are listed in alphabetical order.
Vocables described in the four volumes of the ECDCF
Volume 1 : 50 vocables
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Volume 2 : 107 vocables
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Volume 3 : 171 vocables
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Volume 4 : 180 vocables
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Bibliography
Volumes du DEC
- Mel’čuk I., Arbatchewsky-Jumarie N., Elnitsky L., Iordanskaja L., Lessard A. (1984) Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire du français contemporain. Recherches lexico-sémantiques I, Montréal, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 172 p.
- Mel’čuk I., Arbatchewsky-Jumarie N., Dagenais L., Elnitsky L., Iordanskaja L., Lefebvre M.-N., Mantha S. (1988) Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire du français contemporain. Recherches lexico-sémantiques II, Montréal, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 332 p.
- Mel’čuk I., Arbatchewsky-Jumarie N., Iordanskaja L., Mantha S. (1992) Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire du français contemporain. Recherches lexico-sémantiques III, Montréal, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 323 p.
- Mel’čuk I., Arbatchewsky-Jumarie N., Iordanskaja L., Mantha S., Polguère A. (1999) Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire du français contemporain. Recherches lexico-sémantiques IV, Montréal, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 347 p.
Theoretical and descriptive framework
- Mel’čuk I., Clas A., Polguère A. (1995) Introduction à la lexicologie explicative et combinatoire, Louvain-la-Neuve, Duculot, 256 p.