Patrimonio Léxico da Gallaecia (PLG) (Gallaecia Lexical Heritage) is a subproject of the GEOARPAD project (https://www.geoarpad.eu/gl) within the framework of the operational programme EP – INTERREG VA Spain Portugal (POCTEP), whose main objective is to enhance both the material and immaterial heritage of the Galicia-North Portugal Euroregion. The subproject is coordinated by the Instituto da Lingua Galega. Other participants are a team from the Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto and another from the Centro de Estudos em Letras da Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro.
Within this framework, a tool of the same name (Patrimonio Léxico da Gallaecia [Gallaecia Lexical Heritage], hereinafter PLG) has been developed enabling the identification of the different lexical units that serve to express a series of concepts. This tool also enables a visualisation of the territorial distribution of these concepts within the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, in an area that includes the Galicia-Northern Portugal Euroregion and the Galician-speaking areas of Asturias and Castile and León. Thus, for example, in figure 1, where a query is made for the concept ‘porco teixo’ (bagder), what is provided is a list of lexical units that serve to express that concept in the indicated territory, as well as its spatial distribution.
Figure 1. Search result for the concept ‘porco teixo’
The different concepts are placed under a generic semantic classifier. The major semantic fields established in the PLG are as follows:
The sources from which lexical information is extracted are different works that compile Galician and Portuguese dialectal vocabulary, many of them unpublished or difficult to access: glossaries, linguistic atlases, ethnographic works, academic works, lexical collections carried out in educational centres, etc. All these works have in common that they compile dialectal lexicon with geographical reference corresponding to territories of Galician speech or of the Portuguese municipalities of the Euroregion. This is a part of the set of works that make up the Treasury of the Galician and Portuguese Heritage Lexicon (TLPGP) (which can be consulted in the TLPGP corpus), in particular, those that have lexical information on the indicated territory. The PLG is directly connected to the TLPGP, from which it extracts both the lemmas and variants of which it provides information and the basic semantic classification.
The lemma, coinciding whenever possible with a standard form, is assigned by the publishers and serves to unify phonetic and graphical variants contained in the different works. Thus, for example, the variants tanxujo, teixugo, teixugho, teixujo and tenxugho, all present in different works introduced in the TLPGP and the PLG, have been assigned the standard lemma TEIXUGO.
When the variation is morphological or lexical, the editors assign different lemmas. Thus, TEIXUGO, TEIXO or TEIXÓN, tall of them denominations for the Meles meles, are different lemmas, because they have morphological differences. In the same way, PORCO TEIXO, TOURÓN or MELANDRO are different lemmas, which may have their own phonetic or graphic variants in the works introduced in the TLPGP and the PLG (for example, porcoteixo and porco teixo in the first case; tourón and turón in the second).
Figure 2. Variants associated with the lemma PORCO TEIXO
