I reckon itās a feature, since the grammar is working as intended. The ERG deals with the use vs. mention issue by taking the paired quotes as indication that the quoted expression does not have its ordinary meaning, so it treats the expression (in your example a single token) as the name of a linguistic entity, with the quoted wordās predicate an argument of the general relation āfw_seqā (short for āforeign word sequenceā, even though in this case the single token happens to be from the same language). Since itās viewed as a named entity, the use of the same quantifier proper_q as that used for ordinary names should not be surprising, even if somewhat arbitrary.
Fair enough. I was definitely thinking of proper_q as only for proper nouns.
Follow-on question then: If I run āāwaterā is countableā through ACE, the first two parses are below (there are many more). Why doesnāt Ace give āādeskā is countableā a parse like the first udef_q parse below? It seems like it would be a valid interpretation.
More importantly for my purposes: Iāve never been able to get the foreign quoting feature to work like Iād expect. I assumed that anything in quotes that wasnāt understood would be turned into a series of fw* and quoted__ci predicates. But it is really inconsistent. For example:
'maison' is countable gives one parse that looks very different from the ones above. I was hoping that it would package all the foreign words nicely into something like the fw_seq__xxi/fw_seq__xii and quoted__ci predicates along with the proper_q__xhh and _countable_a_1__ex predicates as above. But instead it doesnāt even appear to use that rule and instead gives:
You wonāt get the udef_q interpretation with desk' that you get with waterā because that interpretation is with a parse that essentially ignores the single quotes, so the analysis is equivalent to the sentence
water is countable
This is a good sentence (though with a silly reading) because āwaterā is a mass noun that does not require an article such as ātheā. In contrast, ādeskā is a count noun, requiring an article if it is singular, so the following is not grammatical:
desk is countable.
Of course, we humans can interpret this sentence the same as the original one with quotes, but the ERG really needs the quotes to signal that ādeskā is being used as the name of the word. It would be too expensive in parsing to consider treating every word in every sentence both with its normal meaning and with the name-of-the-word meaning.