Description of pragmatic properties of lexis in monolingual dictionaries for the Papillon database

The paper aims to propose to add pragmatic characteristic tags for lexis to actual tag set in monolingual dictionaries, and use them to make an automatic acception links on the Papillon database. We have three motivations for proposing it : First, information on pragmatics of lexis is, namely for non-native speakers, indispensable from user oriented viewpoint, in order to give whole information on lexis and to enable them to handle adequately foreign languages. Pragmatics is defined, here, characteristics of the utilization of the language, including psychological motivation of speakers, reactions of hearers, socialized types of utterances, utterance object and speech acts of utterances [Larousse, 94]. Second, the description of pragmatic aspect of lexis will enable publishers to edit conversation-oriented dictionaries, and also to develop a dictionary which contains efficient information for speech dialogue translation. Finally, in the position of database developer, one of difficulties for construction of multilingual database is to make semantic pair of acceptions between language L1 and L2, namely to establish matching pair of corresponding acceptions of polysemy. Actually, a method to make automatically matching pairs by computing meaning distance between lexis in thesaurus is proposed [Laf, 02]. Our idea resides in describing pragmatic information in monolingual dictionaries, and to cope with automatic acception link by using it. In this paper, firstly, we will pick up and observe some deictic expressions in Japanese from the point of view of pragmatics, and, secondly, examine pragmatic tags which will be assigned to them. Finally, we will make dictionary description for some words, and show a possibility to make matching pairs of lexies for polysemic words. 1 We use, here, the word “!acception!” in general linguistic meaning : that’s, a word has several meanings according to context. We call each meaning in context acception, and in the Papillon, each acception is descrived as “!lexie.1!”, “!lexie.2!”........