Eckhard Bick - VISL

I would therefore argue that the distinction be handled not as one of word class
(ADV/KS) but of semantico-syntactic subclass ( and ) and syntactic
function (complementiser or not).
(7a) Quando @ADVL> vem?
(7b) Não sei quando @ADVL> @#FS- @#FS- @#FS-N< nasceu.
On the syntactic level, in a CG system, one must distinguish between the structural
ambiguity encountered in the text itself, and the multiply mapped dependency and
functional ambiguity introduced and then disambiguated as a natural and usually
unavoidable intermediate step in CG-based parsing. While the ambiguity involved in
the latter is “temporary” and designed for disambiguation, the former type of - text
immanent - ambiguity is “true ambiguity” from a purely syntactic point of view, -
and much harder to resolve. Small and lexically idiosyncratic clues have to be
exploited, and world knowledge as well as a larger-than-a-sentence text window may
well be necessary for full resolution:
(1) syntactic form
(attachment ambiguity)
o homem com a
bicicleta da China
('[The man with the
bicycle] from China' -
'The man with [the
China]')
Syntactic ambiguity
(analytical ambiguity)
constituent identity cohesion
(2) syntactic function
um homem que ama
toda mulher.
('a man who loves
every woman' - 'a man
every woman loves')
Where at all resolvable within the universe of one isolated sentence, ambiguities on
the syntactic level are typically addressed by exploiting lexical information about
valency patterns, basic word order probabilities and chunking information from
punctuation, complementiser words or - less important - agreement links. This holds
headed by a conjunctional ‘que’. Rather, the concept extends to relative (“attributive”) and adverbial subclauses, as well
as to averbal subclauses.
- 102 -
(3) anaphora
(linking function)
Amava sua irmã
('he loved his/your
sister')
(4) co-ordination
(linking form)
homens e mulheres no
Brasil
('[men and women]
from Brazil' - 'men and
[women from Brazil]')