Eckhard Bick - VISL

Illustration: Disambiguation of semantic prototype bubbles by dimensional
downscaling (lower-dimension projections)
Let’s take a specific example. As suggested above, it may be near impossible in a
principled way to define the Brazilian Portuguese word fato in however vast a data base,
but in a bilingual (i.e. practically oriented MT-) perspective it would be quite possible
to distinguish between the three Danish translations 'kendsgerning' (fact), 'habit' (suit),
and 'flok' (flock), by means of only two atomic semantic features, ±abstract and ±HUM,
in different combinations, like abstract not living ('fact'), not abstract not living ('suit')
and not abstract living ('flock'). These features are furthermore enough to delimit and
discriminate (not define!) larger prototype families in relation to each other, like
"clothing" () and "group of animals" or "group of people" (in the illustration AA
and HH, respectively). In a Constraint Grammar context a hierarchy of lexicon and
context driven grammatical rules can "discard" or "select" these features in a given
sentence either individually or group-wise in the form of prototypical "feature families"
(like 'clothing') 219 . Thus, if the parser knows from the lexicon that ‘fato’ includes in its
prototype range (‘animal multiplicity’) and (‘clothing’), rules will
219 At present there are altogether ca. 200 different tags for semantic prototypes in my parser. The semantic features of nouns
can be reduced to 16 hierarchically ordered "atomic" features. Verbs are tagged for ±HUM subject selection, and adjectives
for ±HUM nominal selection.
- 369 -