Eckhard Bick - VISL

mais, which by itself does not denote a superlative. The superlative reading resides in
the combination of definite article + comparative. One might say that o really is an
intensifier adject (@>A) of mais, and not an article at all (since it modified the
comparativeness of mais into "superlativeness"), but I have chosen to follow traditional
morphology in this case, and tag o as prenominal dependent @>N (i.e. retaining the
article/determiner reading).
As shown in table (1), the comparandum in (non-superlative) correlative
structures can also be finite subclauses (FS):
(2e1)
é [ser] V PR 3S IND VFIN @FMV ‘[she] is’
mais [muito] ADV @>A ‘more’
bonita [bonito] ADJ F S @A ‘not’
168 Lexicon entries are the preferred solution for "frozen polylexicals", like complex prepositions (e.g., em=vez=de
'instead=of'). This way, the structure can be recognized as a whole already at the preprocessor level, and assigned one
(integrated) word class and syntactic function. Somewhat more difficult is the case of "lexical idioms" (complex nouns and
incorporating verbs), where compound-internal inflexion (at the first element in a complex noun, or at the verb in
incorporations) complicates the situation. Such polylexicals are entered into the lexicon, but the preprocessor alone can't
recognize them without asking the tagger for help - i.e. for morphological/inflexion analysis of the potential parts of such
polylexicals. The above is one example of level interaction in the parsing system.
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