Eckhard Bick - VISL

The fact that these semantic distinctions are not "taggable" on the lower levels, does
not, however, mean that lower level tag context is without disambiguational power.
While the polysemy of 'fato' has to be resolved solely by using semantic
discriminators (abstract countable , clothing , group of animals ) and
semantic context (cp. 6.3.1), other polysemous words can be disambiguated by
morpho-syntactic means:
(11a) mais ar (concrete mass noun) 'air'
(11b) um ar de (anatomical feature) (@N< argument) 'flair'
(11c) boas ares (abstract countable) (plural noun) 'climate'
In (11), the prenominal context answers the question of the word's countability, mais
('much') in the negative, the numeral um ('one') and the plural boas ('good' P) in the
positive, matching the mass noun tag and the countable tags and
, respectively. In (11c), a morphological feature of the word itself (plural: P)
accomplishes the same thing. Finally, for differentiation between (11b) and (11c),
nominal valency () is used, matching the postnominal PP context in um ar de
santo ('an air of holiness').
In the second type 4 example, the thematic role of 'duende' (AG or PAT) could
be deduced either from the verb's valency instantiation (transitive or ergative) or the
@ACC/@ADVL function of 'rubins' /'vezes', respectively. Of course, to provide this
kind of valency or argument information, other semantic information may be
necessary, like - in this case - knowledge about the time-class membership of 'vezes',
and the concrete object feature of 'rubins' (which, in fact, both happen to be marked
in the system's lexicon);
For the incorporating verb example (type 2) it is important, that the inflexional
form of incorporated nouns is lexically fixed, and directly adjacent to the
incorporating verb, not allowing for adnominal modifiers or arguments. This is
lexicalised by different lexicon entries for razão:
(12)
razão#=########42712
__ give {ngn} ret ('to concede that sb is right')
razão#=########42722
__ have ret ('to be right')
razão#=########42707
__ grund, årsag ('reason, cause')
__ fornuft ('reason')
__ (ma) forhold, proportion ('proportion')
Here, the distinction is made by assigning a hybrid PoS to the incorporated noun:
VNP, and tagging it for its incorporating verb (). Disambiguation of the full
noun in ter boas razões para relies on the word's inflexion (plural P), its -1 context
(not 'ter') and its right hand argument context ('para'), all of which interfere with the
VNP reading.
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