A Mathematical Conception of the Dictionary

An attempt to illustrate the application of mathematical logic to linguistics, currently under investigation at the Federal U of Rio Grande do Sul. The entire Portuguese lexicon is divided into series of ordered combinations of words, represented by twenty-six different words, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, eg, those words beginning with the letter "a" are represented by the word alma 'soul', "z" words are represented by zona 'zone'. The Portuguese dictionary is seen as being an ordered combination of all classes' elements associated with morphological, syntactic, & semantic information. When this notion is expanded to include every lang, the dictionary in general can be defined as the entire ordered combination of ordered classes of equivalencies whose elements are associated with morphological, syntactic, & semantic information. M. Meeks