Eckhard Bick - VISL

case of a 3.person possessor, the underspecification with relation to gender and
number can prove a problem when trying to translate into languages where
possessives do have gender/number agreement with the possessor. The same
problem arises for subject-less Portuguese clauses with a finite verb in the 3.person.
In both cases, the translation module runs a "subject gender/number" counter, that
helps resolve the ambiguity of possessives or verb-incorporated personal pronouns in
subclauses or subsequent main clauses 74 .
Working upwards, the next disambiguational distinction to make is the
semantic one. Since most lower level ambiguities have semantic consequences, and
semantics needs a textual vehicle anyway (either lexical, inflexional or syntactic), I
will discuss semantic ambiguity along lexical, analytical and functional lines:
74 This is the only case, where the parser uses an analysis window larger than one sentence (which is the default window
for all CG-based modules).
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