COMPUTATIONAL LEXICOGRAPHY AND LEXlCOI..OGY Neo-Classical Word Formation in WM Electronic Dictionaries

The lexicon of several modern languages such as English, Italian, French, and German contains words which are composed of components corresponding to Ancient Greek and Latin words, but have not been borrowed from these ancient languages. The coverage of this part of the lexicon involves the recognition of the basic units, the description ofthe word formation processes, and the analysis ofexisting words in terms ofthese units and processes. The Word Manager system for reusable morphological dictionaries provides a formalism in which neo-classical word formation can be described in a very natural way. It is assumed that neo-classical formatives do not have a normal syntactic category, so that they have to go through word formation processes which turn them into lexemes of a regular class. By using the same principles and guidelines in the coverage of English and Italian, similarities and differences between these languages stand out.