Eckhard Bick - VISL

life that the work of different grammatical schools working on the same language, is
notationally more or less incompatible. While initiatives like the European EAGLE
project do suggest minimum standards of distinctional complexity (for example with
regard to word classes), a large degree of theory-dependent "idiosyncrasy" remains.
Such - notational - idiosyncrasy is not, of course, entirely arbitrary, but, for each
different school of thought, a logical result of the application of that particular school's
general principles on individual problems, and the quality of a system must always be
measured against what goals it is to serve and which practical uses (e.g. explanatory,
pedagogical, informational, translational) it is going to be put to. Thus notational details
are largely dictated by (internal) consistency and (external) adequacy. From the
technical point of view of automatic analysis, an extremely interesting question is: For
grammatical systems tackling roughly the same overall topic (say, syntax), - how much
information is lost, and/or how much information must be added when "translating" one
notation into another? Consider the following questions and their theory dependent,
notationally different, answers:
(1a) Is "proper noun" a PoS word class or just a semantic distinction?
(1b) Is "do que" a syntactic entity or a word?
(1c) Is the distinction "interrogative" - "relative" for the adverb quando semantic or
syntactic, and is it still an adverb when used "conjunctionally" to head a finite
subclause?
(1d) Is to Peter in "He has sent a letter to Peter" an adjunct adverbial, valency
bound adverbial object, prepositional object or postnominal modifier?
(1e) Is a letter in the same sentence a VP constituent or a clause constituent? And if
it is a VP constituent, is to Peter one, too? And what is a VP anyway, a verb
chain ("continental"), the predicate ("Anglo-Saxon") or verb+subject+objects
("Portuguese") ?
(1f) Is has in the verb chain "has sent" head (as in dependency grammar) or
dependent (as in some constituent analyses) of sent, or neither (but rather a
clause constituent, as in Chomskyan generative grammar) ?
Apart from distinctional complexity (1d) - which is simply about information loss or
gain -, systems also disagree on which level of analysis a certain categorical distinction
belongs (1a-c). More difficult to treat than distinctional and level-incompatibility is
structural notational incompatibility (1e-f), since here, one can not simply relabel a
given grammatical unit, but may have to use smaller, larger or structurally different
units.
In principle, all systems are distinctionally "downward" compatible, i.e.
distinctions can be dropped in favour of informationally "poorer" Portmanteau terms.
Both such "Portmanteau-fusing" and the relocation of a given distinction from one level
of analysis to another, however, is much facilitated in an automatic system, if all
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