Eckhard Bick - VISL

lank spaces 57 , hyphens 58 or - outside abbreviations - punctuation. In the higher
levels of the newest version of the parser (1999), EC-affixes are rehyphenated and
reattached to the main word body, losing their word class tag in the process.
57 In order to establish closely knit syntactic or semantic units, that distributionally or translationally behave like words,
the preprocessor can fuse fixed expressions into words by replacing spaces with equal-signs. The list of fused terms
comprises some complex function words (e.g. a complex prepositions likeem=vez=de - instead of) and verb
incorporates (e.g. dar à=luz - 'to give birth'), as well as names and terms that cannot be separated without destroying the
basic meaning of the compound (e.g. 'Estados=Unidos').
58 Hyphenated clitics are thus regarded as words, and this view is extended to the special case of European Portuguese
mesoclitics with hyphens on both sides, so 'comê-lo-ei' is seen as two, not three words, with an object pronoun
embedded between stem and inflexion ending.
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