Eckhard Bick - VISL

5.3 Disambiguating valency tags
Naturally, in order to supplement word class, syntactic or dependency tags, valency tags
will have to be treated as primary tags, and - if necessary - disambiguated accordingly.
On a yet higher level of analysis, such disambiguation can also be useful with regard to
polysemy resolution. As we will see in chapter 6, valency instantiation is one of the
semantic tools that lends itself to the CG approach, the reason for this being that a
word’s meaning (or, hence, translation) often depends on the presence and type of
valency bound arguments.
Incidentally, the fact that valency instantiation - within a CG framework - allows
fairly seamless and effortless progression from syntax to semantics, seems (in a
technical way) to support Halliday’s view on semantics as “ever more delicate syntax”.
From a technical, CG point of view, valency tagging differs from morphosyntactic
tagging in principled ways. Morphology and word class is first derived from the lexicon
and then disambiguated with the use of other types of primary tags. Syntactic function,
with few exceptions, cannot be derived from the lexicon, but is mapped and then
disambiguated with the use of previously disambiguated morphological primary tags.
Valency tags, finally, are primarily lexicon-based, like morphological and word class
tags, and “come into existence” by mere - root-based - lexical look-up, expressing a
kind of (lexico-syntactic) potential. On the other hand, disambiguationally, valency tags
are even more dependent on previously disambiguated other types of primary tags
(here: syntactic) than is the case in syntactic tagging. Simply, that valency tag is chosen
(from the valency tag list of a given word) which matches an already established
argument category. In most cases, then, the real tagging work has been done on the
syntactic level already, and no new information is gained. Thus, the fact that a direct
object function has been established, implies transitive valency in the head verb, i.e.
monotransitive valency () with no other objects present, ditransitive valency
(, ) with a dative object or prepositional object (@PIV) present, and
transobjective valency () in connection with an object complement (@OC).
Likewise, in the case of pp-attachment to nouns or adjectives with matching valency
(‘confiança no governo’), one could say that the grammar - at an earlier level - already
must have “seen” the relevant valency tag at the noun/adjective when deciding for
attachment and against an @ADVL function tag. Therefore, CG-rules at the valency
disambiguation level are fairly simple, and only in the few cases of ambiguous valency
attachment is there any “real” work left. This is why I prefer to call the process valency
instantiation rather than valency disambiguation.
The following rules are taken from the rule section that instantiates
monotransitive valency ():
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