The Automatic Syntactic Analysis as an Aid in Dictionary Making

In this paper we are going to explain some of the problems we have found in our attempts to mechanize the Historical Dictionary (D.H.) of the Spanish language. Our experimental project is a collaboration of the Royal Spanish Academy (R.A.E.) and the Computer Center of the University of Madrid (CCVM). There are, indeed, many procedures for making concordances of a text, and those procedures are, in general, very successful ones. We are not going to be concerned with concordance making; nevertheless, it seems obvious to declare that a good concordance system must be in the basis of our researches. We must suppose that in our concordances we get syntactically limited utterances, i.e. that in our concordances we do not have to deal with words belonging to sentences whose verbs are not included in the text given in the concordance. By now, the best method of getting this kind of concordances is to limit them by full stops. So, we get our text divided by full stops or semicolons and we analyze as many sentences as verbs could be included between those punctuation marks. But, and we must say it quickly, we are not dealing with complex sentences yet, on the contrary, we are analyzing rather simple structures of