Eckhard Bick - VISL

Underspecification of syntactic function, too, is very common in all parsers,
simply because there is no obvious limit to the degree of "delicateness of syntax" one
might want to introduce. In general, Constraint Grammar adopts the pragmatic and
methodologically logical solution of viewing ambiguities as strict surface
phenomena (Karlsson et. al. 1995:22). In my parser, for instance, the distinction
between complement and modifier postnominal PPs is not made explicit in the PP's
syntactic tag (which is @N< in any case), but only inferable from the preceding
noun's valency tag. However, the line between surface and deep structure, as
between syntax and semantics, is not an easy one to draw - and one may well end up
defending a “deep/semantic” distinction in the name of surface syntax in one place,
and omitting it in another.
The reason why the syntactic underspecification problem needs mentioning, is
obvious from my annotation scheme: On clause level, both dependency and syntactic
function are specified (e.g. @), while on group level dependency
takes over, and head-dependent relation (with the head marked at the tip of the
dependency marker arrow) is the only function there is (e.g. @>N, @NA,
@A