Eckhard Bick - VISL

lexicon which ensure removal of false positive argument mappings, but are
inadequate to capture the full productive range of, for instance, time-, place- and
manner-modifiers, that by morphosyntactic form are indistinguishable of clauselevel
adjuncts.
It is notable that attachment-only errors were almost completely restricted to
post-nominals and adverbials, plus the odd free predicative or apposition, all of
which are not bound by the uniqueness principle. Adverbials can be ambiguous with
regard to position in the clause, and post-nominals are frequently ambiguous as to
order of attachment.
Though there are, of course, marked typological differences between Portuguese and
English on both the morphological level (inflecting vs. isolating) and the syntactic
level (optional subject vs. obligatory subject, relatively free word order vs. fixed
word order), I have found no major differences in terms of CG-typology. Average
morphological ambiguity before disambiguation, for instance, is about 2 for both
languages, and even V - N ambiguity, typical for an inflexion-poor language like
English, is a sizeable problem in Portuguese, too, due to the fact that the masculine
and feminine noun/adjective singular endings -o, and -a both occur in most verbal
paradigms, too. On the syntactic level, neither English nor Portuguese case-marks
noun subjects or noun objects, but Portuguese has the additional disadvantage of
allowing VSO and VOS word order (OV is mostly restricted to pronoun objects,
which are case marked). With regard to finite subclauses, Portuguese - unlike
English - demands an obligatory complementiser (conjunction, relative or
interrogative), which facilitates clause boundary resolution in the Portuguese CG.
On the other hand, Portuguese allows rich non-finite subclauses (usually without a
complementiser), which complicate matters.
Concluding from Portuguese, I would like to suggest the following CG
universals, some of which mirror similar findings published for ENGCG, and might
thus be thought to hold across languages:
• A full-grown Constraint Grammar needs thousands of rules for each additional
level of analysis (in the case of Portuguese, morphology, syntax and
valency/semantics), though of course the number of rules (or even contexts) can
not be used to predict the recall or correctness of a given grammar. Neither (but
less obviously) does the number of rules directly reflect a grammar’s precision,
since disambiguation gain depends heavily on the word class or function targeted
(ch. 3.2.2, table 6). For Portuguese PoS-tagging, noun disambiguation pays best,
since nouns have a good disambiguation gain, and no particular ambiguity bias
(unlike infinitives, which are highly ambiguous word forms, but at the same time
very likely to be, in fact, infinitives).
• REMOVE rules are more typical for Constraints Grammars than SELECT rules,
the proportion in the Portuguese Grammar being 2:1 - and rising, as new rules are
added. In particular, REMOVE rules increase the robustness of the grammar since
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