The project "Lexicograph" emerged owing to Sergej Krylov's idea of 1990 to establish a bibliographical data base devoted to lexical semantics: his plan was to compile a dictionary in which references would be made for each word to the publications concerning it. This idea fascinated a number of linguists and gradually transformed into the project of establishing a lexical semantics data base which would become a lexicographer?s working tool.

At the start, the project «Lexicograph» was developed by Galina Kustova, Elena Paducheva (who became its supervisor), Ekaterina Rakhilina, Raisa Rozina, Sophia Semenova, Marina Filipenko, Nina Jakubova, and Tatiana Janko.

Initially, the semantic aspect of the project implied only categorization of words into such classes as, for instance, PART OF BODY, TRANSPORT, INSTITUTION, etc. (for names), and MOVEMENT, EMOTION, CREATION, POSSESSION, etc. (for verbs). However, then we started being interested in such semantic classes that correlate with the peculiarities of a word?s linguistic behavior. This required a deeper insight into semantics, which brought us, in its turn, to the realization of the necessity to address the word?s semantic explication.

A specific feature of a data base as compared to an «ordinary» dictionary is that a data base requires a uniform explication of different word meanings. Gradually the focus of work on the project shifted in the direction of elaborating the templates for various types of word meaning. As the classical methods of lexicon semantic description were tested on verbs, we decided to concentrate on the latter. In the course of work the essential importance of Vendler?s lexical classes (states, actions, activities, and achievements) was revealed. These categories turned to predetermine not only the aspectual verb properties, as had been known before, but the template of its meaning explication. As a result, the system «Lexicograph» started being apprehended as a tool of theoretical semantics and a step towards meaning formalization.

At present, one can find on our site the information about those of the participants who have been going on to work on the project development, principles of verb semantic description in the system (see Ideology), as well as reference to the publications of project participants based on their work with «Lexicograph». In the time to come we plan to place on the site the data base «Russian Verb».