Eckhard Bick - VISL

elements of a hyphenated word. In the next step, if the combined base forms are
found in the lexicon, or if the preprocessor recognises the polylexical as foreign
language material 14 , the word is reassembled and passed on to the next parsing level
as a whole (tagged with a summary word class tag, but also marked for
"composite"). Otherwise, the hyphenated polylexical will be split into words bearing
their own tag string and a tag. The parser will then assign a syntactic
structure 15 to the word, like N @NPHR and - ADJ @N< for the first and second
parts, respectively, of corvo-marinho (a bird species).
A special case are hyphenated prefixes, like in anti-constitucional. Here, anti-,
since it isn't morphologically fused with the root, is not a "real" prefix in graphomorphological
terms, and can be assigned its own word class and function tags: EC
@PREF ("elemento composto" functioning as prefix). In the newest version of the
parser (1999), hyphenated prefixes are treated as individual (EC-) words on the
morphological level only 16 . For syntactic analysis, EC-elements are re-fused onto
their “head”, and the resulting compound treated as one syntactic unit. Since
prefixes, unlike suffixes, do not usually have any influence on a word’s word-class,
it makes sense to let EC-compounds inherit PoS and inflexion tags from the non-EC
element. Anti-constitucional will thus become an adjective, anti-soneto, contraindicação,
contra-reforma, contra-cheque and contra-revolução will become nouns.
Incidentally, anti- is the only “hyphenatable” prefix, where this word class
inheritance strategy is not universally successful, as the following examples show,
where ‘anti-’ prefixes a noun, but the resulting function is rather adjectival:
lei anti-resgate
comportamento anti-social
política anti-semita
protesto anti-racismo
sentido anti-horário
As a compromise solution, in these cases, the parser will still tag form as N (noun),
but function as adjectival/attributive (@N