Picking up the Chinese phrase, I think how to tag it depends very much on how it is translated into English, given that analysing Chinese is very much influenced by the way English (as the most studied language) is analysed. My first instinct is to tag "包装" as a verb and "精美" as an adverb, as in the translation "a beautifully packed/packaged gift". Then it also occurs to me that it makes sense to tag "包装" as a noun and "精美" as an adjective if we split the phrase into two smaller segments, as in the translation "a gift whose package is beautiful".
Actually your query reveals a problem with the controversial categorisation of POS, as is being discussed in this thread already.
Since Chinese is a remote neighbour of the English language and what applies well to English doesn't necessarily mean it will equally apply to Chinese. So you don't have to confine yourself to the POS tradition in English. I am sure computational linguists dealing with Chinese must have felt a need to create a new set of POS to cater the needs of the different language.
By the way, I think "一件包装精美的礼品" should be strictly translated into "a gift/present with beautiful package" rather than "a present with wonderful decoration", even though it doesn't really matter to your theme of your enquiry.
Best
Xiaotian Guo
SOAS, The University of London (PT Teaching Fellow) and New Vision Language Centre (The Director) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1900 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://www.uib.no/mailman/public/corpora/attachments/20091103/b23792af/attachment.txt>