Eckhard Bick - VISL

• lack of a slot for direct object () or reflexive object () in the verb's valency
inventory suggests se-@SUBJ
Apart from valency, agreement and word order, another - fourth - type of information
can be useful:
Since the impersonal se-@SUBJ per defitionem is assigned the semantic feature
+HUM (cp. the discussion of (4)), it can be ruled out for verbs without the
subject selection restriction, which is marked in the lexicon. For transitive verbs
obligatorily marked , but without a valency reading, in principle both a se-
@SUBJ and a @ACC-PASS reading are feasible. The latter will win even in fair battle
(i.e. with non-specific CG rules), if:
• there is no NP-candidate to fill the verb's @ACC valency slot
• the verb is in the plural
and it would enjoy a strong word order bias where
• an NP @ACC-candidate is pre-positioned.
My intuition after some corpus-inspection is that the border line necessary to delimit the
remaining cases of se-@SUBJ in transitive verbs with direct object candidates is too
soft to make disambiguation practicable. I therefore prefer to make my parser tag, as a
default, all instances of "se" with transitive non-reflexive verbs as @ACC-PASS, and
only choose @SUBJ if number agreement, the uniqueness principle or a special clausal
structure (6c) enforce this solution. Undecided cases of pronominal se, like those
discussed in (5g-h) or (5d) will thus be resolved by the default rule as reflexive
passives. Since passivisation (both analytic and synthetic) is a fairly universal metaphor
for indeterminacy in Indo-European languages, this approach seems to be tenable from
a semantic and MT-point of view, too:
(8a)
Corta- [cortar] V PR 3S IND VFIN @FMV ‘cut is’
se [se] PERS M/F 3S/P ACC/DAT @N ‘the’
cabeça [cabeça] N F S @N ‘the’
rei [rei] N M S @P< ‘king’
$,
fuzila- [fuzilar] V PR 3S IND VFIN @FMV ‘shot is’
se [se] PERS M/F 3S/P ACC/DAT @N ‘the’
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