lexhaustivité

Lexhaustivité, or lexical exhaustivity, is a term used in linguistics and lexicography to describe the degree to which a lexical resource covers the vocabulary of a language or a defined domain. It encompasses the inclusion of lemmas, their inflected forms, senses or meanings, derivational information, and, where relevant, multiword expressions and collocations. A resource with high lexhaustivité aims to represent all items that are pertinent to its intended use, within practical constraints.

Assessment of lexhaustivité combines corpus-based coverage metrics, expert judgments, and cross-resource comparisons. Common measures include the share of tokens or types in a target corpus that are covered by the lexicon, the recall of sense inventories, and the representation of derivations and collocations. Lexhaustivité is shaped by language variety, domain scope, and editorial goals; general-purpose dictionaries tend toward breadth, while domain-specific lexicons may prioritize depth. Practical constraints such as data availability, maintenance costs, and the evolving nature of language create trade-offs between exhaustivity and usability. In natural language processing and language resources, higher lexhaustivité can improve parsing, disambiguation, and translation, but only if the added items are accurate and well-structured.

Lexhaustivité is related but distinct from semantic exhaustivity, which concerns how much information an utterance conveys. It is also closely linked to complementary concepts such as lexical coverage and dictionary completeness. The term is more common in French-speaking discussions of lexicography and corpus linguistics, where it guides decisions about scope and resource maintenance. See also: lexicon, dictionary, corpus linguistics, lexical database.