This project aims at improving the lexicographic representation of nouns in learner's dictionares and in bilingual dictionares, that is, the lexicographic works which are most widely used in learning contexts. The research focused on grammatical features of plurality and countability in Catalan, Spanish, and English, with the conviction that a contrastive analysis of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of nouns in those three languages in relation to the features mentioned above could shed some new light on the treatment of a grammatical difference which entails a great complexity, since the compared languages categorize the semantic and grammatical notion of countability in quite a different manner. In this sense, the results obtained from the studies on lexical semantics which have most recently treated this matter cannot be directly transfered to dictionary composing in learning contexts, since, on the one hand, they focused for the most part on English, thus not paying much attention generally to other languages-like Spanish or Catalan-and, on the other hand, they have approached the matter in a philosophical way, which implies specialised knowledge and notions too complex to fit in a dictionary thought for language learners. Due to its orientation, which is mainly lexicographic and applied , not merely descriptive, not only has this project concentrated on the linguistic characterization of countability in nouns, but also on the study of the different requirements a dictionary entry must have regarding English and Spanish thematic abbreviations.

Research results:

1. Contrastive analysis of the different ways of codifying countability in Spanish, Catalan, and English. These differences have an effect on the incidence the noun countability feature has on the grammar of each language, but also have to do with which nouns have countable and mass senses in the three languages. Since the countable/non-countable difference is mainly a grammatical feature-and not exclusively semantic, it is oberseved that each language establishes different noun classes according to countability preferences (Lanunci 1952).
2. Lexicographic representation proposal of grammatical information associated with the countable/non-countable features. Given the intrinsic complexity of the problem in question, the advisability of codifying the grammatical information in layers is defended, for it allows different levels of depth regarding the look-up. This means that, depending on the linguistic knowledge of the learner, a different degree of complexity is needed in the presentation of grammatical information, so the complexity of designing the look-up interface lies in determining which information is essential to all users and which information is more suitable to advanced learners.
3. Creation of a relational Spanish-English database for mass nouns. The design of the database interface intended to get different levels of look up, depending on learners' needs, as well as to put these levels in relation for and with the other language. The database has been implemented on Microsoft Access, a versatile computer program which easily allows conversion to other languages.