A proposed microstructure for a new kind of active learner’s dictionary

This article is intended as the first of a series of papers designing an electronic linguistic resource made up of three modules: (1) a phrase-based active dictionary thought of as a first attempt to implement John Sinclair’s vision of the “ultimate dictionary”; (2) a grammar / construction describing not only the morphologic and syntactic rules of a language but also its systematic (semantic) alternations and the derivations generating new meaningful constructions from old ones; (3) a phrase thesaurus / phraseological conceptual ontology taking WordNet into the modern “age of phraseology”. After introducing the theoretical framework of our project, we present the microstructure of our Phrase-based Active Dictionary (PAD) model and describe it in a general theory of lexicography.