Eckhard Bick - VISL

± HUMAN EXPRESSION 220 (i.e. qualifiable by adjectives etc. usually associated
with humans), e.g. política agresiva (‘aggressive politics’)
± ADJECTIVAL (FEATURE), e.g. tamanho (‘size’)
± LOCATION (as an independent feature, because -MOVE -MOVABLE alone
doesn’t cover abstracta), e.g. concerto (‘concert’)
± TEMPORAL
Note that the feature tree is organised as a decision tree. Therefore, it is possible to infer
only those features from terminals, that lie in the decision path leading to that terminal.
Animals, for example, are moving, non-human, animate and concrete, and the parser
can disambiguate the concept ‘animal’ as true for a given sense by instantiating all these
features, or as wrong, by disallowing at least one of the features. However, due to the
way in which features are lumped into prototypes by physics or language/cognition,
other atomic features may be inferred or used for disambiguation as well. Thus, all
moving things are also movable, i.e. something that isn’t movable, can’t be an animal.
Some prototypes, on the other hand, violate the branching rules of the feature tree
because of metaphorical usage. The prototype (institutions), for instance,
comprising words like igreja (‘church’) or justiça (‘justice’), routinely promotes
buildings or abstract nouns to +HUM status by allowing them to act, think, decide and
order.
Therefore, the feature tree must be understood as a theoretical point of
departure, while the real parsing system is built upon feature set intersection and
disjunction for individual prototype bundles, thus relying heavily on the inclusion or
exclusion of certain key features with a maximum of distinctive power. Exactly which
positive or negative features can be inferred from which other positive or negative
features, is shown in the table below, where all 16 atomic semantic features are plotted
against the parser’s prototype classes for nouns, which are bundled according to the
atomic feature bundles they match (one table row per prototype/feature bundle). The
prototypes of institution (), town () and country (), for instance, form
a bundle, and share the same set of atomic features, positive for CONCRETE/ENTITY
(they can be touched), HUM (they can wish, decide and act), LOCATION (something
can be in them), and negative for all other features.
A feature X can be inferred in a given bundle, if there is a feature Y in the
same bundle such that – with respect to the whole table - the set of prototype bundles
with feature X is a subset of the set of prototype bundles with feature Y. In the table
below, inferability is marked in the following way:
220 The difference between ±HUM and ±HUMAN EXPRESSION is to a certain degree isomorphic to the distinction
between argument selection and modifier selection: ±HUM words can fill the subject slot in, for instance, speech verbs,
while ±HUMAN EXPRESSION (only) can fill the head slot for human modifiers: triste (‘depressed’), otimístico
(‘optimistic’).
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