IMAGACT4ALL: Mapping Spanish Varieties onto a Corpus-Based Ontology of Action

IMAGACT is a corpus-based ontology of action concepts, derived from English and Italian spontaneous speech resources, which makes use of the universal language of images to identify action types. IMAGACT4ALL is an Internet infrastructure for mapping languages onto the ontology. Because the action concepts are represented with videos, ex- tension into new languages is done using competence-based judgments by mother-tongue informants without intense lexicographic work involving underdetermined semantic description. It has already been proved on Spanish and Chinese and it is now in the process of being extended to Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Urdu, Oriya, Polish, European and Brazilian Portuguese. IMAGACT4ALL has also been successfully used to implement language varieties, as European and American (Argentinian) Spanish. The first part of this paper presents the infrastructure and the methodology for mapping languages onto the ontology. In the second part we present the results of a comparative analysis of European and American Spanish data derived from the database, that show relevant distinctions in the referential properties of the Spanish verbal lexicon in the two language varieties.