Eckhard Bick - VISL

In other contexts, para is not usually valency bound either, at least not as such 211 .
Like the benefactive in (9b), it appears to be semantically governed when it fills the
direction slot of adverbial complements of verbs like ir ('go'), viajar ('travel'), allowing
for alternation with other directional prepositions like a and até. In the case of (9b), the
benefactive seems to match an inherent thematic role slot of a whole group of
"aquirance" verbs. While the semantic anatomy of ordinary ditransitive verbs ('to
give', 'to send') can be described as CAUSE HAVE, "aquirance" verbs ('to take', 'to
buy') seem to display a BECOME HAVE structure, the difference being reminiscent of
that between the causative and inchoative/ergative aspects (to kill - to die). In the first,
change is complemented of the object, in the second, of the subject. This explains why
"se" is so loosely bound in (9b) - if the subject thematic role - as normal for ergatives -
were that of patient, no pronoun would be needed (as in other verbs of the BECOME
HAVE group: 'to get', 'to receive'). However, "aquirance" verbs subcategorise for agent
subjects, which makes MAKE (BECOME HAVE) a better semantic dissection, and
explains why there is a certain potential for the surface manifestation of a patient role -
as when se-@DAT is added in (9b). In Danish, the distinction can be made in much the
same way: 'få en øl' (= 'to get a beer') can be made "active" by adding the reflexive
pronoun sig: 'få sig en øl' (= 'to go and get a beer').
Technically, in terms CG-rule dynamics, the distinction of 4 different "functions"
of pronominal se has proven quite effective, preventing uniqueness principle and
valency pattern based rules from making wrong argument choices with regard to other
constituents, especially subject and direct object NPs in clauses containing pronominal
se. Thus, while somewhat controversial in its linguistic interpretation and somewhat
dynamic in its distinctions, and in spite of introducing new ambiguities (and resulting,
new, “se-internal” errors), the more fine-grained approach has helped improve - all
other things equal - overall parser performance (as compared to the original, purely
morphologically based, case mapping approach with only @ACC and @DAT
readings) 212 With regard to the functional tagging of pronominal se itself, however, the
use of subcategories like impersonal (indeterminate) subject and reflexive passive may
well create benchmark and correctness measurement problems, which are being
circumvented by the optional use of a post-parser filter program fusing the above
distinctions into a functionally underspecified Portmanteau tag, @REFL, - in much the
same way pronominal se is left underspecified with respect to (morphological) case
(ACC/DAT) on the morphological tagging level.
211 It may be valency bound, as a preposition that can head a - valency bound - directive adverbial.
212 Of course, as a computational linguist, I am inclined to think that the disambiguational usefulness of a category may well
by itself be regarded as an indication that the category in question is not entirely without a structural base, but reflects - to a
certain degree - corpus reality and system "uncontradictoriness".
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