An analysis of a particular word such as kutub in can be construed either as an analysis of a particular occurrence of that word in a particular text, or as an analysis of its lexical structure. The latter interpretation would be particularly useful in a situation in which the word with that or a closely related analysis occurs more than once in the text. If the analysis is viewed as that of its lexical structure, then the analysis of the actual textual occurrences of the word can be specified as a function of its lexical analysis. In the simplest case the function is identity, and in that case we can simply set a pointer from the textual occurrences of the word to its lexical representation using an IDREF attribute on whatever tag is used to delimit the textual occurrences in the text. At this point, we have not settled on the name of this attribute nor what tags this attribute can be used with, but expect to have a recommendation shortly. The name lexp was suggested in a working paper of the committee. Alternatively, one could use the alignment mechanism to relate all of the textual occurrences of a word to the representation of its lexical structure. This alternative has the advantage of generalizing more readily to situations in which the structure of the textual occurrence of a word is not identical to its lexical structure. We consider briefly here two such situations.

First, if we wish to associate more information with a textual occurrence of a word than is provided in its lexical representation, then we would create a structural representation for it that incorporates the lexical structure as a proper part, presumably using the f.ptr tag, and align the textual occurrence of that word with its structural representation, along with (if desired) its lexical representation. Second, if we wish to associate less information with a textual occurrence of a word than is provided in its lexical representation, then we would create a structural representation for it that incorporates only those parts of the lexical structure for that word that are appropriate for that occurrence. For example, if the lexical representation contained several interpretations of the word (using f.s.OR), and the textual occurrence of the word only had only one of these interpretations, then the representation of the structure of the textual occurrence of that word would incorporate only that aspect of the lexical structure (using f.s.choice) that is part of the structure of the textual occurrence. Again, we could align the textual occurrence of that word with its structural representation and (if desired) with its full lexical representation.