Classifying Multi–Word Expressions in the Latvian Monolingual Electronic Dictionary Tēzaurs.Lv

Abstract

The electronic dictionary Tezaurs.lv contains more than 400,000 entries from which 73,000 entries are multi-word expressions (MWEs). Over the past two years, there has been an ongoing division of these MWEs into subgroups (proper names, multi-word terms, taxa, phraseological units, collocations). The article describes the classification of MWEs, focusing on phraseological units (approximately 7,250 entries), as well as on borderline cases of phraseological unit types (phrasemes and idioms) and different MWE groups in general. The division of phraseological units depends on semantic divisibility and figurativeness. In a phraseme, at least one of the constituents retains its literal sense, whereas the meaning of an idiom is not dependent on the literal sense of any of its constituents. As a result, 65919 entries of MWE have been manually classified, and now this information of MWE type is available for the users of the electronic dictionary Tezaurs.lv