Eckhard Bick - VISL

obligatorily. In the intransitive, there is a meaning change stressing the process of
eating, but this seems to be analogous in English and Danish, and cannot be detected in
translation. Lançar, finally, is next to obligatorily transitive.
In general, due to ellipsis and anaphoric usage, it is more common for a verb to
move “down” the ladder of transitivity than “up”. In Portuguese, yes/no-questions are
answered by repeating the “naked” finite verb in the first person, without any
complements:
Come peixe? - Como.
Posso telefonar? - Pode.
Thus, even auxiliaries and otherwise obligatorily transitive verbs can appear in the
intransitive, at least from a parsing point of view where the window of analysis is the
sentence.
On these grounds, short of tagging all verbs for both and , it is difficult
to find a safe lexicographic strategy for marking valency potential. In the parser’s
current lexicon, the strategy has been to list the maximal valency potential, i.e.
preferring or over , since it is more dangerous for the parser’s
syntactic performance to have a rule discard an @ACC reading due to a missing
tag than allowing an @ACC reading for longer than necessary, due to a superfluous
tag. The reason for this is that my CG rule set is very “cautious” - with much more
REMOVE rules than SELECT rules - and that, once discarded, tags cannot be
recovered, while wrongly undiscarded readings can always be discarded by another rule
later. Also, lexically unprovided-for intransitivity comes as a natural by-product in the
robust CG system in those cases where there isn’t even a candidate constituent for the
role of @ACC, while unprovided-for transitivity is always a problem, precisely because
there is a constituent (the @ACC candidate) waiting to be tagged, and risking to be
tagged wrongly.
Therefore, only very rare valencies are omitted. With regard to and , the
preferred valency is listed first, a fact which can be exploited in the CG by declaring
order sensitive sets:
LIST = ( ) ; preferably transitive, but potentially intransitive
LIST = ( ) ; preferably intransitive, but potentially transitive
Typically, these sets will be used in order to make rules more cautious, as in the
following context example, where monotransitivity () is demanded as the preferred
(but not necessarily only) valency:
(... LINK NOT 0 )
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