Grammatical Dictionary of Polish: The Current State and

Grammatical Dictionary of Polish:
The Current State and Perspectives
Zygmunt Saloni1 , Włodzimierz Gruszczyński2 ,
Robert Wołosz3 , and Marcin Woliński4
1
University of Varmia and Masuria, Poland
2
Warsaw University, Poland
3
Institute of Computer Science PAS, Poland
4
University of Pécs, Hungary
The subject of this paper is a grammatical dictionary of Polish published recently
by the authors. The dictionary has been worked out in an electronic form and is
accessible through a computer program. It is based on the homogeneous grammatical
description of contemporary Polish worked out in last 35 years by a team of Polish
linguists. Having accepted new solutions proposed in the 2nd half of the 20th century
(masculine subgenders by W. Mańczak, verbal stem classes by J. Tokarski, classification
of functional lexems by R. Laskowski and M. Grochowski) the description continues the
tradition of Polish grammar. Many details have been proposed by the members of the
team (the general system of genders, the declension of pronouns and numerals, two-stage
presentation of Polish morphology: surface (exponential) and deep (functional)). The
best elaborated part of the dictionary is the conjugation which has been compiled as a
relational database since 1997. Now the whole lexical material is arranged likewise.
The dictionary provides an extensive grammatical description of Polish words. It
covers about 180000 lexical units (lexemes). For each lexical unit a complete inflection
table is generated, all forms marked with their respective grammatical features. We
deem that for the first time such a rigorous description has been applied so extensively.
Our inflectional description strives for completeness (exhaustiveness), whereas the
derivation and syntax are described as far as a clear formalized approach was feasible.
For nouns, the dictionary defines their gender (covering details such as masculine, neuter,
and pluralia tantum nouns split into subclasses); for verbs it provides aspectual pairs and
regular derivatives (participles and gerunds); for adjectives, not only comparatives and
superlatives, but also regularly-derived adverbs and nouns are presented. Non-inflected
lexemes are provided with their part-of-speech feature and the valence information is
added where instructive (case government for prepositions, type of conjoined phrases
for conjunctions).
The core of the dictionary consists of words found in readily available sources:
dictionaries and texts. The most frequent proper names are also included. As mentioned
some regular derivatives are often presented in the entries. The elaboration of lexical
items varies depending on their stylistic character and their frequency in contemporary
Polish texts.
Various user needs have been taken into account in our dictionary, some apparently
contradictory. The interface was designed as accessible both to a linguist and a generally
educated layman seeking to solve particular problems of language form and usage. Many
decisions concerning the display (the shapes of tables, distinctions, colors etc.) were
taken in order to make the dictionary user-friendly.
All lexemes are characterized by a set of features, displayed on the monitor. The
entry can be selected by typing it in a dialog box. Another access point to the entry
is browsing the list of entries. This list can be sorted in two ways: ordinary (a fronte)
and backwards (a tergo). The compact disc containing the program is accompanied by
a printed introduction, facilitating its use and presenting the theoretical principles used
by the authors. It contains a detailed discussion concerning the set of Polish lexemes,
the principles of segmenting Polish texts and the scope of the dictionary.
This dictionary may serve as a source for research in Polish inflection and—to some
extent—syntax. It can be also used in the automatic processing of Polish. We hope that
it may be useful also for teaching Polish, especially as a foreign language. The database
form allows to easily develop the dictionary by providing its entries with additional
information and to enrich the lexical material. Moreover it makes changes in the user
interface easy. In the next edition, for example, we plan to extend the user’s interface
by searching arbitrary morphological features.
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