Eckhard Bick - VISL

demais, mais [‘yet’], menos, aí, mesmo, paca, pra=chuchu
Simplex prepositions
a, ad, afora, ante, apesar, após, até, com, contra, de [], diante, durante, em
[], embora, entre, exceto, fora, malgrado, mediante, per [A], pera [A], perante, por
[], pra, pós, qua, salvante, senão [where translated as ‘but’], sob, sobre, trás, versus, via
antes, depois, para, sem
mais, menos
de
Specifying word class internal particle ambiguity
Generally the morphological module only disambiguates primary (morphologically
and paradigmatically defined) word classes. However, some adverbs and a few
pronouns are so important for structuring the sentence and, thus, important for the
disambiguation of other words, that some of the secondary () features have been
subjected to disambiguation themselves. The main case is the ‘relative’ -
‘interrogative’ ambiguity of como, onde, quando, quanto, quão, que and quem. Apart
from these, only the ‘set operator’ - ‘intensifier’ ambiguity of mais/menos and the
‘quantifier’ - ‘conjunctional adverb’ ambiguity in senão, that have been treated in a
similar way.
Puristically, no harm is done to the integrity of primary word classes, since
these subdivisions could easily be fused again afterwards, removing all secondary
-tags.
Apart from syntactic function, there are semantic reasons for introducing the
subdivisions in the disambiguation scheme: as shown in the table below, nearly all
subclass distinctions in the adverb group coincide with the necessity of using
different translation equivalents in Portuguese-Danish word pairs. Early
disambiguation - a hallmark of CG - would make things easier for a bilingually
oriented semantics module later on. For the word mais even more subtle distinctions
might be appropriate (‘temporal’ não mais - not any more ).
Table: particle subclasses
ADV ADV ADV ADV ADV KS KC PRP
como som hvordan da, fordi 65
onde hvor hvor
65 The distinction between como ADV and como KS is really a semantic one - one I wished to make early, i.e. in
the morphological/word class module of the parser. Another possibility would be to fuse the two classes, and replacing
the KS tag by ADV plus a secondary tag like . After all, it is not uncommon for adverbs or comparators to share
lexical shape with what otherwise might be called a causal conjunction, like the Romance 'por que' (Spanish 'porque',
Italian 'perche'), the English 'as' and the - spoken - German 'wo'.
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