Eckhard Bick - VISL

um verão ‘a summer’ * ok. *
ferro ‘iron’ * * ok.
(b) carne cerveja paulistas
‘meat’ ‘beer’ ‘paulistas’
comemos ‘eat’ ok. ? *
bebemos ‘drink’ * ok. *
convidamos ‘invite’ * * ok.
(c) falou latia aconteceu
‘spoke’ ‘barked’ ‘happened’
a criança ‘the child’ ok. * *
o cachorro ‘the dog’ * ok. *
a festa ‘the party’ * * ok.
In (a), a human noun as np-head () matches - and is matched by - a human
adjective-modifier (). Neither head nor dependent can be exchanged with another
class from the table: Periods of time () and materials () can’t be modified by
adjectives asking for human heads, and time adjectives () or thing adjectives ()
can’t modify human heads.
In (b) and (c), the valency of the three verbs for direct objects (b) or subjects (c) is
semantically specified, and must be matched by the right semantic class in the object or
subject noun. Like in the head-modifier case (a), conditions work both ways: one can
eat meat, but not beer or paulistas, and meat can be eaten, but not drunk or invited.
Children can talk, but don’t bark or happen, and talking is done by children, not dogs or
parties.
In the parser’s present lexicon, the semantic classification of verbs and adjectives
is less fine-grained than that of nouns. The basic set of distinctions is ‘human’, ‘animal,
‘plant’ and ‘non-living’:
semantic class adjectives verbs taking class verbs taking only verbs taking class X
X
modifying X X subjects class X subjects objects
human
animal -
plant -
non-living -
Only the first three columns are fully implemented in the lexicon, while semantic object
restrictions are listed in the lexicon only for a few verbs. However, these object
restriction classes and other semantic verbal classes can be defined as ad-hoc sets and
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