Eckhard Bick - VISL

Because of these problems, I would like to propose a co-ordination test. Since
valency bearing nouns govern a specific preposition, which cannot be exchanged and
bears no literal meaning, co-ordination with nouns where the PRP @N< would keep its
literal meaning, should not be possible. In other words, a postnominal pp can only be
shared by two co-ordinated noun heads if both valency-bind that preposition, or if both
don’t. In the examples, valency governing nouns are in bold script:
*a execução e a idade do revolucionário (ARG-MOD clash)
*o medo e o tamanho da crise (ARG-MOD clash)
*a confiança e a crise no governo (ARG-MOD clash)
a execução e a festa da véspera (MOD-MOD co-ordination)
o medo e a febre da criança (MOD-MOD co-ordination)
um espião e um comunista no governo (MOD-MOD co-ordination)
a cativação e a execução do revolucionário (ARG-ARG co-ordination)
Another argument/modifier test for postnominal pp adjects can be based on whether the
introducing preposition can be replaced by another “literal” preposition, like
substituting ‘sem’ for ‘com’, or one place preposition for another. In modifier pp’s, such
substitution is usually syntactically possible (barring some semantic oddities), while in
argument pp’s, any preposition has to obey selection restrictions dictated by the
preceding np-head.
On a corpus basis, ambiguous cases like ‘o medo da criança’, where a noun
allows the same pp both as argument and modifier, seem to be rare, and given enough
valency and semantic information from the lexicon, Constraint Grammar could probably
be made to handle the distinction in most cases. As a first step, CG rules would remove
argument adject readings if the head noun bears no valency tag () for the
preposition concerned. As a second step, rules should check whether the preposition’s
argument (@P