Eckhard Bick - VISL

Intuitively, one might assume
(a) that a subject reading is more likely before the predicator than after it, and
(b) that noun phrases denoting humans, are more likely to function as agent than
others, and might therefore have a larger affinity to subject function
Whereas (a) is a syntactic rule and fits in naturally with the CG-rules on the syntactic
level, (b) presupposes semantic lexical information, that must be expressed as
secondary tags, i.e. tags, that are not (on this level!) intended for disambiguation
themselves.
In order to test the two assumptions, I have statistically analysed the computer's
parses for one and a quarter million words, as shown in table (1). Since shorter,
manually controlled texts show the parser's syntactic error rate to be lower than 3% (cf.
chapter 3.9), the dubious cases will disappear in a sea of safe correct readings (like
those where the uniqueness principle can be applied, or where verbs have obligatory
direct objects), - and therefore distributional patterns may be trusted even when derived
from automatic analysis alone. Even if all errors were subject-object errors (which they
are not!), a ±3% margin of statistical significance would not change much in the ratios
calculated below.
(1) The influence of the semantic feature on the probability of subject
tags vs. direct object tags (573.285 words from VEJA, plain numbers, and
690.269 words from the Borba-Ramsey corpus, numbers in italics). Percentages
measure the frequency of a given function within a certain semantic group.
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