Not Only Meaning… Verbel: The Electronic Dictionary of Paradigms of Polish Verbal Multiword Expressions

Abstract

This article presents Verbel: The Electronic Dictionary of Paradigms of Polish Verbal Multiword Expressions (MWEs) and discusses theoretical problems connected with compiling such a dictionary for inflectionally complex languages such as Polish. The dictionary includes over 5,000 Polish verbal MWEs and explicitly presents their forms and constraints in inflection. It also provides grammatical, semantic, pragmatic and prescriptive commentaries. The first part of the article covers the theoretical and methodological basis used in the compilation of the dictionary. Generally, a verbal MWE is inflected according to the paradigm of the verb which is its main component. However, MWEs may have some specific inflectional constraints connected with other factors (e.g. semantic, pragmatic), which result in different paradigms for verbal MWEs and for the verbs that are their main components. In the second part, the conception and content of the dictionary are discussed. Finally, the natural language processing tools that underlie the work on the dictionary are described.