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Eckhard Bick - VISL

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always treated as feminine in Portuguese, which might be exploited heuristically in<br />

this case. Otherwise the chain is treated as in (4a), as a kind of analytical default.<br />

(6b) is an example for the prototypical institution name, which usually boasts much<br />

more internal structure. In fact, due to the scarceness of contiguous, "(6a) - type",<br />

potential nominal heads (which would favour the name reading over the noun<br />

reading, since the first allows for @NPHR @N< @N< ... chains 31 ), the word class<br />

distinction between noun and name does not structurally make any difference in this<br />

case:<br />

(8) 'o' DET @>N<br />

'Instituto' N/PROP @NPHR<br />

'para' PRP @N<<br />

'Reprodução' N/PROP @P<<br />

'Humana' ADJ/PROP @N<<br />

'de' PRP @N<<br />

'Roma' N/PROP @P<<br />

The worst case scenario (7) are foreign language name chains containing<br />

syntactically important particles or content words with lower case first letters. As<br />

long as all words in the chain are capitalised, an approximate analysis can be<br />

obtained by assigning the PROP word class to all members of the chain allowing for<br />

a functional structure like in (4a). The examples in (7), however, contain the particles<br />

'n', 'of' and the apostrophed inflexion morpheme ''s' in lower case letters. The only<br />

easy solution to this problem is to enter the most frequent of those (English) particles<br />

into the (Portuguese!) lexicon. Thus, 'of' (as well as Dutch 'van' and German 'von') is<br />

listed as PRP, and -'s as PROP M/F S. Thus, (7a) gets a fair internal<br />

analysis 32 (Massachusetts @NPHR Institute @N< of @N< Technology @P

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