Para Os Dicionários Do Futuro– the Interaction between Words and Images

This paper corresponds to the presentation of a Ph-D’s project being carried out at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, Department of Lexicology, under the supervision of Prof. Willy Martin. The project’s framework is the interface area of Lexicology and the new Information Technologies, its main focus being the relationship between words and images in the brain. The final aim of this Ph-D is the creation of a multimedia database prototype, from which different kinds of “virtual” dictionaries may be extracted. The model will be based on the idea that the dictionaries of the future will indeed be virtual in the sense that they will be derived from a main database that can give birth to an immense variety of different products according to the user ́s needs and wishes. In the first part of this Ph-D’s project, we have analysed the evolution of dictionaries in time and their different types, with a focus on illustrated and pictorial dictionaries. This have led us to the existing multimedia dictionaries on CD-ROM. We have also dealt with the concept of lexical databases and have given a first insight into what is the core of this project, namely the conception of a multimedia database where the various modalities of knowledge representation are used in an intelligent way and from which all kinds of “virtual” dictionaries can be derived. In this prototypical multimedia lexical resource the different databases are real, the links between database items are real, but the dictionaries themselves are virtual, i.e., they can be created and customised to suit one’s own circumstances. In the second part, the broad area of the representation of knowledge in the mind is studied, the main topics being: words in the mind, the psycholinguistic assumptions of the mental lexicon; pictures in the mind, models of processing and storing visual and linguistic information; the bodily basis of meaning and the “image schemata” theory (Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M.).