There are many special cases, right down to the individual word level, where general rules need to be overridden. To do this, we have a NOTCONSISTENT operator. It can be used to strip alternatives under particular circumstances so general rules will not see them. For instance,
NOTCONSISTENT(PossessivePronoun, Noun)
If the particular noun can also be a verb (such as "equal"), this alternative can be stripped from it, on the basis that it follows a Possessive Pronoun.
The contents of the operator are filled by using Properties in Editor to go to the operator, then Edit Node Details and the NotConsistent form in Network Display, as
In this example, there are three different possibilities for a participle. It can be
 | Participle (part of compound verb made up of auxiliary and participle) |
| AdjectivalParticiple (used in a noun phrase, like "running water") |
| ParticipialModifier (participle as remaining fragment of relative pronoun phrase, as "...of vial <that is> sold") |
The neighbouring word or words on either side and their types are used to prune inconsistent alternatives at the word level. The method of pruning is to build a NOCHILD operator on the associated ANDPARSE variable, so the object and its parents will be forbidden when finding parents.
Where no alternative should be removed and the connected word type is adequate for matching, None is used. Where a more precise match is needed, click in the edit field and use the Context form to select a word type, or even a word. The Match button turns the selected variable into a necessary match for the line to be effective (shows green in edit field and M against the variable in the list). For deletion, the variable corresponding to the alternative to be removed is found by clicking in the edit field and using the Context form, then clicking Add to fill in the line in the list. Both in matching and deleting, the direct variable and all its membership descendants are found, so putting Participle for deletion will also delete PresentParticiple and PastParticiple. In some instances you will want to jump out of deletion for special cases - if the line matches all its entries (including None) and has no deletion value, further line matching and deletion is bypassed.
The individual match lines can be deleted or moved up or down in the list using a popup menu.
NOTCONSISTENT can have up to five parameters, as
NOTCONSISTENT(Noun, Equal, To)
where the rule is specific to constructions like "an amount equal to 50 dollars", and the alternatives for "equal" of noun, adjective and base form of verb may be confusing, so can be removed, leaving only AdjectivalModifier (the Adjective form would cause the recognition of "an amount equal" as a noun phrase, a mistake).
ANDWITH and NOTWITH can be used to filter the alternatives that arrive for pruning.