Function and Class in Linguistic Description: The Taxonomic Foundations of Grammar 3030781720, 9783030781729

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Function and Class in Linguistic Description The Taxonomic Foundations of Grammar Mário Alberto Perini

Function and Class in Linguistic Description

Mário Alberto Perini

Function and Class in Linguistic Description The Taxonomic Foundations of Grammar

Mário Alberto Perini Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

ISBN 978-3-030-78172-9    ISBN 978-3-030-78173-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book was written primarily for linguists working on the description of natural languages, and also for students of linguistics, at the graduate or advanced undergraduate levels. It does not assume the knowledge of any particular linguistic theory, although a good command of the concepts current in traditional grammar, such as taught in middle school, is useful for following the exposition. The approach is descriptive rather than theoretical. This does not mean that all theoretical assumptions are avoided, which is not possible, but that stress is put on observation, description, systematization, and preliminary analysis of data, relying, whenever possible, on widely accepted theoretical notions; and whenever a new notion must be used it is fully defined and explained. I tend to believe that linguistics is currently in its “Natural Philosophy” stage, where observation and systematization of data are of crucial importance, and construction of general theories is still in the future. A theory will be eventually built, in all likelihood preceded by several partial theories dealing with sub-areas of the whole structure. Here I intend to give a contribution to one of these partial theories, the one that aims to describe the taxonomy of linguistic units. However, even such a partial theory, while of course desirable, is not yet in existence; it depends, among other things, on more extensive surveys of data. Here I offer some guidelines on how to go about the v

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completion of this task. Only thus will we be able to construct theories that are sufficiently grounded on empirical data. I must make it clear that this is not a book about the Portuguese language. Portuguese, which is my main area of inquiry, provides most of the data, but the theme of the book is the discussion of the taxonomy of linguistic units. Most (although not all) examples given come from Brazilian Portuguese, but the relevance of the discussion is not limited to the structure of one language. The text was written with the English-­ speaking reader in mind, and all examples are translated, with literal glosses where necessary; and English examples are preferred whenever the two languages are parallel at the point under study. I believe some of the conclusions are relevant to the description of Romance languages and English, but I do not generalize this for all, or most, languages, since I believe general or universal statements can only be made when previously supported by extensive descriptive surveys of many different languages. This book represents one step in that direction, but many steps remain to be taken. Among the many people who helped me during the elaboration of this book, I must single out a few. My wife, Lúcia Fulgêncio, was, as always, my best reader and most acute critic, having read the manuscript and contributed suggestions grounded on her long experience as a linguist and language teacher. I also thank Gabriel A.  Othero of UFRGS (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), for his lucid and detailed comments on the text, which led me to several important reformulations; and Júnia V. Melo (aka MizMelo) of the University of Adelaide, Australia, who assisted me on innumerable points of English grammar and vocabulary. Several of my students at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) also contributed with notes and criticism; and useful suggestions came from an anonymous reviewer for Palgrave Macmillan (but all defects to be found in this work are, of course, of my entire responsibility). I am also grateful to CNPq (an agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology) for a research grant during the writing of this book, and to UFMG, where I have been a welcome guest as a volunteer and Professor Emeritus. Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Mário Alberto Perini

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I General Principles   7 2 Classification and Knowledge  9 3 Form and Meaning 17 4 Word Classes 37 5 Classes and the Grammar 91 6 Prototypes111 7 Assignment by Default133 Part II Descriptive Application 151 8 Classification of Verbs153 vii

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9 Constructions of Directional Motion: A Guided Tour of Valential Complexity167 10 Functions and Classes in the NP191 11 Towards a Taxonomy of Connectives227 12 Adverbs and Their Relatives257 13 Features in Grammatical Description269 14 Semantic Correlations and Syntactic Features277 15 Beyond the Lexicon297 Summary309 Appendix A313 Appendix B317 Appendix C319 Appendix D321 References325 Index335

About the Author

Mário  Alberto  Perini  is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas (Austin), and has taught at Campinas University (UNICAMP), Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUCMinas), University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and University of Mississippi (Oxford). His current research deals with general and Portuguese lexicology, semantics, and syntax in a cognitive perspective. This is his 17th published book, all in the areas of linguistics, Portuguese, and language teaching. The list includes: Modern Portuguese: A Reference Grammar (2002); Talking Brazilian: a Brazilian Portuguese Pronunciation Workbook (2004); A língua do Brasil amanhã e outros mistérios (2004); Princípios de linguística descritiva: introdução ao pensamento gramatical (2006); Describing Verb Valency: Practical and Theoretical Issues (2015); Gramática descritiva do português brasileiro (2016); Sintaxe (2019); and Thematic Relations: A Study in the Grammar-Cognition Interface (2019).

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4 Table 11.1 Table 11.2 Table 11.3

Functional features of the word cat44 Three classes of words defined by the features R and Q 60 Nominals: four words, four classes 62 Nominals: six words, five classes 64 Partial functional potential of some connectives 66 Valency: six verbs, six classes 69 Qualifiers and classifiers 71 Proper and common items 73 Proper and common items, including Canadá73 NP head, modifier (English) 96 Features R and Q (English) 96 Expression of the goal with 21 Verbs 174 Expression of source, goal, and source + goal with 21 verbs 176 Expression of source, goal, and source+goal with viajar ‘travel’181 Some NP components 210 Some NP constituents, classed by position 215 Case inflection in English personal pronouns 219 “Pronominal” features of some items 222 Some features of nine connectives 232 Até and other connectives and adverbials 235 Connective classes according to mood in the subordinate verb247 xi

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Table 11.4 Table 12.1 Table 12.2 Table 13.1 Table 13.2 Table 14.1 Table 15.1

Grammatical behavior of some connectives 248 Grammatical behavior of some “adverbs” 264 “Adverbial” and “adjective” use of some items 265 Some grammatical features of four nominals 271 eu, me, ela, pai273 Verb and noun forms 287 “Adverbial” and “adjective” phrases 303

1 Introduction

The taxonomy of linguistic units is arguably the most extensively studied area in the whole of linguistics; it goes back at least to Aristotle, and has produced a huge amount of bibliography ever since. Surveying this immense body of scholarship is beyond the possibilities of a book like the present one, which is, instead, conceived of as a guide for linguists working on the description of particular languages. It includes not only the development of ideas but also the results of descriptive work, here focusing primarily on Portuguese (which is my main area of study), but with occasional suggestions for application to other languages, namely Romance languages and English. No attempt is made to cover the whole of the relevant literature, and research is mentioned only so far as it is directly relevant to the point in discussion; and even so, taking into account the limitations of one linguist, working mostly alone. The emphasis is on the criticism of current ideas on taxonomy, and the proposing of better alternatives; I hope that this book will be of some utility to linguists working on description, and that it may encourage discussion about the topics here approached. The approach is descriptive rather than theoretical. This does not mean that all theoretical assumptions are avoided, which is not possible, but © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. A. Perini, Function and Class in Linguistic Description, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6_1

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that stress is put on observation, description, systematization, and preliminary analysis of data, relying, whenever possible, on widely accepted theoretical notions. Here I follow the spirit of Chomsky’s statement that […] the most crucial problem for linguistic theory seems to be to abstract statements and generalizations from particular descriptively adequate grammars and, wherever possible, to attribute them to the general theory of linguistic structure. [Chomsky 1965, p. 46]

with some restriction as to the attribution to the general theory—not in principle, but because I feel that no adequate theory is currently available. As stated in the Preface, I tend to believe that linguistics is currently in its “Natural Philosophy” stage, where observation of data is of crucial importance, and construction of general theories is still in the future. Some decades ago Maurice Gross put the situation in clear terms: […] in all natural sciences […] accumulation of consistent data precedes theoretical advances. [Gross 1979, p. 868] [Linguists] insist constantly on the truism that accumulating data without prior ideas or theories is a senseless activity, hence the necessity to elaborate theories first. […] Linguists have been totally unaware of the converse of their rule […]: there is no possible theory without concomitant accumulation of data. [Gross 1979, p. 880]

A theory will be eventually built, in all likelihood preceded by several partial theories dealing with sub-areas of the whole structure. Here I intend to give a contribution to one of these partial theories, the one that aims to describe the taxonomy of linguistic units in Portuguese and in other European languages. But even such a partial theory, while of course necessary, is not yet in existence; it depends, among other things, on more extensive surveys of data, duly organized and systematized; in this book I offer some guidelines on how to go about the completion of this

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task. Only thus will we be able to construct theories that are sufficiently grounded on empirical data. The situation today has markedly improved as compared with the one described by Gross; but theoretical work without adequate empirical support keeps being done by many linguists, which is one of the factors leading to the well-known phenomenon of the short life expectancy of linguistic theories. That is, there is still a lot of room for the description of extensive areas of the structure, which hopefully will, in due time, lead to the construction of more reliable theories. In general, as pointed out by Gross, building the description depends on theoretical notions, and these notions depend on the result of description. The way out of this dilemma is, clearly, to work simultaneously on both fronts. The work here reported relies on theoretical points of wide acceptance among linguists; and, while there is no way to entirely avoid the introduction of new theoretical concepts, an effort was made to always define them as concretely as possible. In general, the system here developed has not as its primary aim to predict the facts of the language—it mostly observes, describes, and offers a preliminary analysis, largely based on widely accepted theoretical notions. Let us hope that this proves to be one of the paths toward a better understanding of these phenomena. In some passages the reader may feel that I fail to keep strict distinction between competence and performance; for instance in Sect. 6.1.2, where I discuss the conditions under which information about verb valency should be included in the grammar, and bring in conditions of learnability as an argument for excluding some of this information; and also in the discussion of the internal structure of the NP (Chap. 10). I tend to agree, at least in part, with Langacker’s position that […] at best the competence/performance distinction is unclear and problematic; as things stand, to invoke it in this manner is essentially vacuous. In actual practice, the effect of this distinction has been to insulate the framework from any possible attack based on its obvious psychological implausibility. [Langacker 1991, p. 262]

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One thing that must be taken into account is that the analysis of linguistic objects must, at some moment, reach the levels of phonetic and cognitive structures. Consequently, a description of competence that does not fit into what is observed cannot be adequate; and, even if we accept the dichotomy as valid, the fact remains that only performance can be directly observed, allowing the testing of hypotheses against real data. This book is built around two main theses, namely: (a) The most adequate way to categorize linguistic units, and in particular words, is by considering the grammatical and semantic features which describe the functional potential of each unit. This results not in separate classes like the ones found in traditional analysis (nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and so on), but, at least at a first approach, in a great variety of feature compositions, associated with lexical items.1 A second stage of the work of classification must be the search for typical clusters of features, associated with a large number of items; but there is little hope that all or most words in a language will fit into a small number of such clusters. Borderline cases are certainly numerous, play a fundamental role in the grammar, and must also appear in the description. Word classification is then a vastly more complex system than usually assumed. (b) The essential function of language is to relate forms (ultimately, phonetic sequences) and meanings (ultimately, cognitive representations). And the description of the way a language carries on this task depends not only on rules, lexical items, and other elements of the structure of the language, but also, crucially, on world knowledge, that is, the schemas2 evoked by lexical items. In certain cases the connection between a linguistic unit and its meaning is effected by more direct means than usually realized, so that a unit is directly put into relation with an element of the schema, without the intermediation of grammatical rules. The role of language structure in such cases is  I refer to lexical items, especially words, but basically the same applies to larger units, such as phrases (see Chap. 15). 2  I used the plural schemata in my previous books, but it seems to have become archaic since. Following fashion, I use schemas now. 1

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c­ omparatively small, which entails a partial redrawing of the border between language and cognition, assigning more tasks to cognitive processes than is found in most current models. This has consequences for the classification of words, since some features must be considered extralinguistic and irrelevant for grammatical description—although not for a total description of the understanding process. One of the ambitions (or, perhaps better, one of the dreams) that motivated the writing of the present book, as well as the preceding ones (Perini 2015, 2019), is that linguists of several theoretical persuasions may come to appreciate the descriptive methodology here proposed, to the point of finding it useful as a source of suggestions for their research. Accordingly, this book does not contain anything in the line of a complete list of possible word classes; at most, it offers preliminary guidelines for constructing such a list. It was conceived starting from the belief that we are just beginning to understand the main principles of the taxonomy of linguistic units, as applied to lexical items and to larger units. The most that can be found here are some directions and suggestions for future research, as well as an invitation to the serious, hard, and fascinating work that will take us to a better understanding of the way a language works. Readers may find here more questions than answers, but this is an inevitable condition of linguistic research, given the limitations of our knowledge at the present time. Comparatively little in this book is really new: the reader will find that most of the ideas presented here derive from traditional insights. What I claim to have done is: (a) carry traditional insights to their logical conclusion; (b) state the principles and rules involved in the most explicit, coherent, and clear way possible; (c) leave aside traditional analytic templates; and (d) have no fear to follow these principles wherever they may lead. Finally, a note on the way the book is planned. I have included some redundancy, so that a few key points are treated in more than one chapter. This has two advantages: first, it avoids the bothersome need to keep going back to previous sections in order to understand the current one; and, second, it may partially accommodate the

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current fashion of reading only isolated chapters of a book. But this book is conceived as a unified exposition, and can only be fully understood if read as a whole; I hope at least some of my readers will have the time and energy to do so.

References Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gross, Maurice. 1979. On the failure of generative grammar. Language 55 (4): 859–885. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Perini, Mário A. 2015. Describing verb valency: Practical and theoretical issues. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ———. 2019. Thematic relations: A study in the grammar-cognition interface. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Part I General Principles

2 Classification and Knowledge

2.1 C  lassification1 as a Condition of Knowledge Humans are always classifying things: that is, grouping them into classes, according to certain features. For instance, we class many objects in our experience as “animals”: dogs, horses, cats, bats. These objects have certain features in common, and when we are faced with an object new to our experience, and having the same features, we put them into the same class: say, a wombat and a sloth are clearly animals, even for someone who has never seen such creatures before. That is the way our mind works—and so much the better, because if we had to store each particular being, event, or idea individually, not only would we have too many entities to memorize but we would not understand them. In other words, Without concepts, mental life would be chaotic. If we perceived each entity as unique, we would be overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of what we  For our purposes, I  take the  term categorization, common in  the  literature, as  a  synonym of classification. 1

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experience and unable to remember more than a minute fraction of what we encounter. And if each individual entity needed a distinct name, our language would be staggeringly complex and communication virtually impossible. (Smith and Medin 1981, p. 1)

The way it is, each of these entities is viewed as having a bunch of properties: a sloth is an animal, but also a physical object (unlike linguistics), a mammal (unlike an alligator), a fruit-eater (unlike a panther), and typical of South America (unlike a wombat). Each of these features narrows down our cognitive schema so that it approaches a “realistic” image of a sloth; and of course there are still other properties that might be called on if needed. These features do not split the class of animals hierarchically: we cannot say that mammals split into South American and non-South American ones, and that South American mammals split into fruit- and meat-eating animals; this latter division works for animals in general, not just for South American ones. That is, there is a great amount of cross-classification, each dividing line crossing many others, so that the resulting panorama is much more complex than one that follows hierarchical lines.2 Another important point is that classifying features are used according to descriptive objectives. Thus, to a paleontologist concerned with the history of species, the division into mammals and birds is relevant because it corresponds to a real split that occurred in the past; from this point of view, food preferences and size of each animal are secondary. But for an ecologist trying to describe the way animals function in a particular environment, it is essential to distinguish them according to diet (fruit, grass, meat, and so on), and from this point of view a bat and an insect-eating bird may be brought together in a class. And, of course, for someone lost in the jungle the main distinction may be between large, meat-eating

 This is valid for a synchronic classification of living things according to their physical characteristics and way of living; their evolutionary classification follows other lines, and can be described in terms of hierarchically organized groups: mammals comprise placentals and marsupials, and placentals comprise carnivora, primates, rodentia, and so on without interference between these groups: there are no marsupial primates, for instance. There is an approximate parallel in the genetic classification of languages, where it makes no sense to speak of a language as simultaneously Romance and Semitic. 2

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animals (panthers, alligators) and harmless herbivores. Consequently, the classification of animals only makes sense given a particular context. All this is obvious enough; and yet it is not always kept in mind when working on the classification of linguistic units such as words, phrases, and morphemes. But the same general principles that apply to the classification of animals (as well as of plants and other entities of nature) are valid for the classification of linguistic units. This will be argued for in detail in this book; for the moment, I open the exposition by stating that we cannot give, out of hand, a list of word classes, any more than we can give a list of animal types. That is, it makes no sense to ask, out of context, “How are words classified?” Arguing for this assertion is one of the aims of the present book. Classification is, then, a necessary ingredient of knowledge, including language knowledge. No linguistic analysis has ever been elaborated that does not make crucial use of classes: this can be easily seen in most grammatical statements, which typically refer to nouns, verbs, NPs, clauses, person suffixes, and so on—terms that denote classes, not individual units. The crucial importance of classes is recognized by some authors, to the point of some excess; for instance, Harris (1951) proposes a “grammar of lists” (that is, classes), and says: In one of its simplest forms of presentation, a synchronic description of a language can consist essentially of a number of lists. (Harris 1951, p. 376)

This position entails transferring a large amount of complexity from the grammar to the lexicon, so that at the end a lexical item will contain vastly more information than we are accustomed to believe—not necessarily a bad thing, certainly. But I suspect the question is largely notational, in the measure that the same information is needed, after all, and including it in the lexicon or in a separate “grammatical” component may have to be decided on the grounds of simplicity of the description. Here, to avoid going into this highly complex question, I make frequent use of the term lexicogrammar.3  Jackendoff and his associates seem to be moving in the direction of increasingly integrating lexicon and grammar (I owe this observation to Gabriel Othero). 3

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2.2 C  lassical, Probabilistic, and Exemplar Conceptions of Classes 2.2.1 Smith and Medin’s Distinction Smith and Medin (1981) distinguish three main conceptions of classification, which they call classical, probabilistic, and exemplar: [the classical view] held that all instances of a concept shared common properties, and that these properties were necessary and sufficient to define the concept. […] [I]n the past decade the criticisms [against this view/ MAP] have become more frequent and intense, and new views have emerged. Perhaps the most prominent of these assumes that instances of a concept vary in the degree to which they share certain properties, and consequently vary in the degree to which they represent the concept. This view has sometimes gone by the name of prototype, but since this label has been used to mean many different things, we prefer to call it the probabilistic view. Another emerging view, which offers an even more extreme departure from the classical one, holds that there is no single representation of an entire class or concept, but only specific representations of the class’s exemplars. This we call the exemplar view. (Smith and Medin 1981, pp. 1–2)

When we come to the task of classifying words, these views do not necessarily exclude each other. The decision must be made for each case on the basis of empirical verification: in principle, it may very well be that some linguistic classes are composed of items having one or more features in common, whereas for others, equally functional in the language, no common feature can be found. This is a possible situation, and only examination of the data can refute or confirm it. Here, as always, we must be prepared to face complexity, which is one of the most impressive traits of language; as a mere guess, I would suggest that the presence of common features is found among the members of all linguistic classes. Prototypes, in spite of being inconsistently used in the literature (as pointed out by Smith and Medin), are a useful resource of analysis, amenable to precise definition. I believe prototypes are a central element in

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the workings of grammar, if conveniently defined; I return to this point in Chap. 6. One possibility, which I suspect works for many word classes, is that feature composition varies very much among items, but a large survey will reveal typical groupings (bunches) of features valid for large groups of items, so that, partially at least, the classical view may be adequate for an approximate description. And it definitely seems that features are not all equally important, some of them being essential for the working of broad-spectrum grammatical rules, some being in charge of local details. This can be clearly seen in the classification of verbs according to valency: in Portuguese, occurrence in the diathesis we call C1 (VSubject>Agent— Verb—NP>Patient),4 for example, o gato comeu o queijo ‘the cat ate the cheese’, splits the whole class of verbs into two great subclasses (something approaching fifty-fifty), whereas diathesis C24 (defined as VSubject>Stimulus—Verb—a NP>Manner) applies only to two verbs (feder ‘stink’, cheirar ‘smell’), for example, o armário está cheirando a mofo ‘the wardrobe smells of mold’,5 and defines a very restricted division among verbs of the language. The general picture cannot be fully evaluated until we have a comprehensive survey of the lexicon. For the moment being, our main task is to accumulate facts; and for this I propose the adoption of an inductive working hypothesis: as an initial approximation, let us assume that each unit (word, in our case) is a separate case as far as its feature composition is concerned. Instead of starting by the search for generalizations in the classification of words, we will attempt to find features relevant for describing grammatical behavior, and apply them to individual words, one by one. This does not mean adopting the “exemplar” view of classes: as we study a large number of words classified in this way, we also look for typical associations of features, valid for relatively large sets of items—that is, word classes.

 The symbol ‘>’ is used to connect a syntactic unit and its accompanying semantic role. C1, C24, and so on are arbitrary designations used for ease of reference in the Valency dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese verbs (in elaboration); see definitions of these constructions, as well as explanation of the ‘V’ in VSubj, in Appendix A. 5  In European Portuguese, this construction appears also with saber ‘taste (like)’. 4

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2.2.2 Is Smith and Medin’s Distinction Valid for Linguistic Units? The question may be premature, for lack of sufficient observation of data. There is no reason to assume, a priori, that only one kind of class is needed, and we may find cases that correspond to all three conceptions. At least some word classes are definable in “classical” terms. For instance, a verb in Portuguese may be defined as a lexeme that includes morphologically marked oppositions of tense, mood, and person; only verbs show these oppositions, and all verbs do. Furthermore, the verb, so defined, can occur as a predicate head and can have a subject with which it agrees. That is, it is possible to define a set of features that works for all verbs, and that precisely correspond to each other; the class of verbs is then “classical”, as far as these features are concerned. Other classes seem “probabilistic”, and include (to repeat a quotation) instances of a concept vary in the degree to which they share certain properties, and consequently vary in the degree to which they represent the concept. (Smith and Medin 1981, pp. 1–2)

We will see examples of such classes when we consider verb valencies (Chaps. 8 and 9). For the moment, it is enough to say that verbs are classified with respect to their valency, by means of bunches of features, each feature expressing a construction where the verb can occur. Another example is so-called adverbs: some of them can only modify verbs (tenderly), others can modify adjectives (very); a third group can modify verbs and adjectives (probably); and so on.6 How one can find prototypes in such cases will be discussed in Chap. 6. By the way, I agree that prototype is a pretty ambiguous term in modern linguistics, but I keep this designation, and will make an effort to come to a more clear definition. As for the exemplar view, I fail to see how it is applicable to lexical and grammatical phenomena. Smith and Medin say that “there is no single representation of an entire class or concept, but only specific representations of the class’s exemplars” (1981, p. 2). But what, exactly, do these  Greenbaum (1969) gives many examples from English.

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exemplars have in common? How can we tell this from any random grouping of items? The authors explain that if concepts are represented by their exemplars, there appears to be no room for abstractions. […] An exemplar of the concept clothing, for example, could be either “your favorite pair of faded blue jeans” or the subset of clothing that corresponds to blue jeans in general. In the latter case, the so-called “exemplar” is of course an abstraction. Hence, even the exemplar view permits abstractions. (Smith and Medin 1981, p. 143)

But in this case I do not see a difference between the exemplar view and the other two. Smith and Medin seem to have in mind nonlinguistic situations, in which individual mental images emerge when one deals with a class. In language this is most unlikely: do we have a particular verb as the exemplar of the first conjugation? I conclude that we can safely ignore the exemplar view as far as knowledge and use of language is concerned.

References Greenbaum, Sidney. 1969. Studies in English adverbial usage. London: Longmans. Harris, Zellig S. 1951. Structural linguistics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Edward E., and Douglas L.  Medin. 1981. Categories and concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3 Form and Meaning

3.1 F ormal, semantic, and symbolic components in description Speakers of a language have intuitive access to the difference between features of meaning and features of form. Features of meaning are accessible to introspection, as observed by Talmy: Linguistic introspection is conscious attention directed by a language user to particular aspects of language as manifest in her own cognition. […] Not only is meaning the aspect of language that linguistic introspection is best at, but, in addition, introspection has the advantage over other methodologies in seemingly being the only one able to access it directly. [Talmy 2007, pp. XII–XIII]1

Features of form are directly observable, since they are phonetically realized, and accessible to sensorial perception. It is this ready  Many linguists, like the more mechanistically minded structuralists, argue that the use of introspection is not legitimous even for purposes of ascertaining meaning (cf. for instance Harris 1951, p. 187; Bloomfield, 1933). This idea seems to be implicitly accepted by some modern authors; see criticism in Perini (2015, Appendix E).

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accessibility of form and meaning that makes it possible for language users to relate sounds and meanings—the raison d’être for the existence of languages.2 I call them “facts” because they are not conditioned by theories or hypotheses: cat sounds [ˈkæt], and refers to a particular species of animal (Felis cattus); any theory that ignores these facts is inadequate as a description of the language. This example illustrates a third kind of feature, which we may call feature of symbolization:3 forms are associated with meanings in particular languages in a systematic and stable way, so that the association between [ˈkæt] and Felis cattus is part of our knowledge of the language, shared by all speakers. Symbolic facts—signs, in Saussure’s (1916) terms—are the real object of linguistic study; and consequently it is crucial to keep semantic and formal features carefully apart in a first moment. In particular, they must be defined and delimited without reference to each other—we cannot define Felis cattus as “any animal that can be called cat,” because we would be presupposing something that is the aim of our analysis. This may seem obvious, but it is not always observed in practice. Traditional grammar is plagued with definitions that are neither purely formal nor purely semantic, and that are useless for description. A “noun” (substantivo) may be defined as the class of lexemes characterized by referring to what we conventionally name substantive objects, that is, first of all, substances (homem [“man”], casa [“house”], livro [“book”]), and in second place any objects mentally apprehended as substances, that is, qualities (bondade [“goodness”] […]), states (saúde health”] […]), processes (chegada [“arrival”] […]). [Bechara 2009, p. 112; my glosses / MAP]4

 It is one of the basic tenets of cognitive linguistics that language is “an instrument for organizing, processing, and conveying information” (Geeraerts, 2006, p. 3). 3  This is Langacker’s (1987, p. 77) terminology; I would prefer signification, to keep the connection with the sign, but symbolization seems to be widely adopted, and besides signification is used in a more general meaning. 4  My translation, here and in all quotes from works not in English. 2

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The same grammar states (p. 141) that a noun can be the head of a subject phrase, of a direct object, and so on, which are syntactic functions. This results in a confused notion of “noun,” sometimes taken as a semantic category, sometimes as a formal one. This confusion prevents the stating of an important symbolic fact, that is, that the words that can refer to things are (largely) the same that have the formal features of a noun: in Portuguese, among other features, they must belong to a gender, and have plurals in -s. A clear way to state this symbolic fact is to say that a subject (syntax) must have as its head a word with referential potential (semantics). But this is impossible in the traditional system, which does not systematically distinguish syntactic function and referential potential (a semantic function), and consequently incurs in a great deal of confusion. Let it then be clearly established that there are formal facts (accessible to our senses), semantic facts (accessible to introspection), and symbolic facts (defined as the association between formal and semantic facts). This is the raw material the linguist works with, and the more carefully defined it is, the better. Precisely because we aim at stating the relation between facts of form and facts of meaning, we must start with a clear distinction between these categories, so that we can investigate their associations. Symbolic relations are, of course, more abstract than formal and semantic ones; but they are still concrete enough, and largely accessible to the intuition of native speakers. In simple cases (as for instance in the phonetic shape and meaning of words like cat), these relations are often concrete and easy to understand. In more difficult cases, they may depend on some theorization, as when one is concerned with the semantics of such items as the, in, or and, or when we attempt to state the semantics of syntactic functions. But in any case formal, semantic and symbolic units and relations are all we have to start with, and deserve to be considered the facts of lexicogrammar.5 To summarize: when we examine a linguistic form we have a set of immediate observations on which to base the analysis. These observations  For the purposes of the present discussion, I ignore extralinguistic factors such as the situational context. This derives from the decision to study (initially) the literal meaning of sentences (see Sect. 3.2). 5

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fall under two categories, features of meaning and features of form, plus a third category, derived from the relation between the two former ones, features of symbolization; these types of features correspond, respectively, to Langacker’s (1987, pp.  76–77) semantic, phonological, and symbolic spaces. It is essential to keep these kinds of features (or spaces) well apart if we are to study the relation between forms and meanings, universally held to be the main object of linguistic inquiry—each lexical or grammatical statement must be clearly identified as semantic, formal (morphosyntactic), or symbolic. Or, in other words, In order to work out the interface between syntax and [conceptual structure], we need to know what sorts of structures the interface is connecting. [Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, p. 153]

Features of meaning are, naturally, the most difficult to observe, and also to express, partly because of our currently deficient knowledge of semantics; this does not make them less concrete, or less essential for the analysis. In the next section, I turn to some problems that arise in the observation of the meaning of linguistic forms.

3.2 Literal Meaning 3.2.1 What Is “literal meaning”? The word “meaning” covers a wide range of phenomena, and its use in the literature is not as consistent as desirable. In grammatical analysis, “meaning” means “literal meaning”: we deal with literal meaning when establishing semantic roles and constructional meaning. But “literal meaning” is a notion that calls for some explanation. The notion of literal meaning, although it is used in practice by most linguists, is somewhat controversial in the literature. The controversy arises from the observation that sentences and other units can be understood in different ways according to context. For instance, the sentence [1] I forgot your name.

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can be understood as information about the content of the speaker’s memory, but also as a request for the addressee to tell her name. From the observation of such facts, some authors have come to the conclusion that linguistic structures have no meaning independently of their occurrence in contexts. To make my position clear from the beginning, I hold that words (as well as sentences, etc.) do have literal meanings, and that these meanings are coded in the language user’s memory. This does not mean that they are rigidly bound to specific referents; there is a certain amount of flexibility, otherwise words would be of little use in normal circumstances. Nor does it mean that each word has only one meaning: this varies greatly from case to case, from phoneme, which has basically only one meaning, to head, which has several. And it does not mean that context is irrelevant for the final meaning—the cognitive representation (CR)—that we construct partially on the basis of utterances, but it does mean that there is a set of readings associated with each lexical item, grammatical function, and construction, and that this association is part of our knowledge of language, stored in our memory prior to the production and understanding of actual utterances. The condition of presence in memory prior to the production of utterances is important: what we have stored in memory is items,6 each with its associated meaning; memory contains no ready-made contexts. Instead, memory has a set of instructions on how to build linguistic utterances; their insertion in contexts must come afterward. But how are utterances to be built, and duly inserted in the appropriate contexts, if they have no meaning attached to them in the first step of the process? Suppose I decide to say that this beer is expensive: the word beer, as all others here, must be selected over other words, like soup or bed, and this depends on the meaning it carries previously to the construction of the utterance. We cannot wait until the sentence is built and contextualized in order to assign meanings to the words, constructions, semantic functions, and so on until the end of the process; I select beer because I want to refer to beer, the because the beer is a given entity, is because the utterance is to convey a current situation (rather than a past or future one), and so on.  Including, of course, words, morphemes, constructions and rules of the language.

6

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Of course, situational context adds elements relevant to the construction of the cognitive representation: from it, we learn that the beer in question is, say, on the restaurant menu, that what is on the menu is not the beer itself, but its name (and price), that expensive probably means $20, rather than $2,000, and so on. The CR depends on contextual factors but also on information provided by the linguistic sign itself; in other words, elements of the extralinguistic context, plus the literal meaning provided by the sentence. The latter depends on information present in the structure of the language, and without this information, there would be no way to arrive at the intended CR.

3.2.2 Discussion of the problem in the literature All this must be made explicit in advance because one finds some skepticism about these points in the literature. For example, Langacker (2008) argues that an individual mind is not the right place to look for meanings. Instead, meanings are seen as emerging dynamically in discourse and social interaction. […] Rather than being fixed and predetermined, [meanings] are actively negotiated by interlocutors on the basis of the physical, linguistic, social, and cultural context. [Langacker 2008, p. 28]

This applies to cognitive representations, but as a characterization of meaning as a whole it is incorrect, as I hope to show in this section. Langacker only considers one kind of meaning, here called the CR, and does not recognize a purely linguistic level (literal meaning).7 I believe, instead, that the latter is “fixed and predetermined,” independent of context, and previously established by social convention. This contrasts with CRs, which depend not only on literal meaning, but also on what Langacker calls “negotiation.”  See Sect. 3.2.4, and also Perini (2019, section 3.2), where I argue that a distinction is needed between semantic roles (part of the structure of a language) and elaborate thematic relations (ETRs; part of the cognitive representation). 7

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In order to explain how words convey meanings, we need at least a starting point, because after all we do not attach the same meaning to dog and violin. There is ample evidence that lexical items are associated with meanings, and this can only happen in the speaker’s individual memory. An example is given by Lakoff (2004), who reports: When I teach the study of framing at Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is give my students an exercise. The exercise is: Don’t think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I’ve never found a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. [Lakoff 2004, p. 3]

We cannot explain this phenomenon unless we assume that the word elephant is associated in the subjects’ minds with a particular meaning; and, furthermore, that the association is stable and essentially the same for all speakers, otherwise this word would be useless for communication. I take this evidence as showing that the meaning of lexical items is indeed fixed and predetermined, at least to some degree. As for linguistic context, mentioned by Langacker as one of the areas where speaker-hearer negotiation takes place, its contribution to interpretation crucially depends on at least some items having predetermined meanings. Otherwise, we would have the strange situation of a chain of items, none of which is previously associated with a meaning, which in some way interact so as to generate meaning. Schank (1981) writes: Dealing only with isolated sentences was probably the root of many of the problems involved with the theories proposed by transformationalists. People do not understand sentences in a null context. Why then did our theories try to deal with sentences out of context? The answer was obviously that this was thought to be a simplification that would facilitate research. [Schank 1981, pp. 114–115]

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I agree only in part. It is certainly true that even sentences that make up an utterance by themselves are understood in context; but this does not necessarily entail that studying isolated sentences is devoid of interest. The final understanding of an utterance (what I call here the CR8) is the result of a very complex set of factors, including context and world knowledge. Now, one of these factors is provided by sentence structure, plus lexical information; otherwise it would not be possible to distinguish between [2] and [3], and use them to build correct cognitive representations: [2] Jane pinched the boy. [3] The boy pinched Jane.

No contextual or pragmatic information can account for the meaning difference between these two sentences: the crucial features have to do, first, with the syntactic functions of Jane and the boy in each sentence, and, then, with the valency of the verb pinch. It does, therefore, make sense to study the grammatical structure of these sentences in isolation, since in any context [2] will mean that Jane did something, as against [3], where the boy is the Agent. This generalizes to a host of other grammatical and lexical features. On the other hand, I agree with Schank’s statement that dealing only with isolated sentences will lead to problems, if we are interested in sentence and discourse comprehension. However, work on isolated sentences without any regard to their function in integrated discourse was, and is, done by linguists of many persuasions; this is, to my mind, perfectly ­legitimate, provided that it is recognized that we are faced with a complex phenomenon, and lexicogrammatical information is only one of its components. Our raw data are a product of several meaning ingredients, and

 This is Talmy’s (2000) term. Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980) call it a rete di conoscenze (“web of knowledge”), and Schlesinger (1995) a scene. I called it a mental landscape in a previous book (Perini 2015). 8

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one of the initial problems in research is to tell them apart to the point where the study of only one of them—say, literal meaning—becomes possible. Sentences out of context contain relevant information about aspects of CR, and the study of isolated sentences is a necessary step toward the study of language comprehension. In a case like I forgot your name, the hearer can start by computing the literal meaning of the sentence; this has to do with the state of the memory of the speaker, an information that may be judged irrelevant in a particular context. The receptor then makes use of other (nonlinguistic) information to arrive at a final understanding having to do with a request to tell his name. But literal meaning is one of the necessary starting points in computing the cognitive representation, and it can, and must, be studied by itself. Returning to Schank’s passage, I agree that the study of isolated sentences cannot, by itself, explain the basic phenomenon whose study is the aim of linguistics, namely the connection made by speakers between vocal sounds (or written marks) and CRs. But this only applies to the exclusive study of isolated sentences; they are needed in order to make explicit literal meaning, without which the whole phenomenon cannot be accounted for. If generativists, and other linguists, are to be blamed for something, it is only for not paying due attention to the complexity of the phenomenon, not for concentrating their studies on isolated sentences.9 Rumelhart (1979) seems to adopt a position of some skepticism toward the need for literal meanings: To a linguist interested in form-meaning pairs, or to a philosopher interested in truth conditions, this distinction might be crucial. […] As a psychologist I find myself primarily interested in the mechanisms whereby meanings are conveyed. Whatever role “literal meanings” […] might play in the comprehension of language […] psychological theory must concern itself with conveyed meanings. [Rumelhart, 1979, p. 71]

 And certainly not for a mere desire to simplify research, as intimated in Schank’s passage.

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In this passage, he seems to admit the possibility that literal meanings may be necessary in linguistic analysis, but apparently not in psychological studies. But if we assume a real-life attitude toward linguistic analysis, there is no way we can do without any of these two perspectives: whenever someone understands a sentence or a text, this crucially depends on linguistic and nonlinguistic processing—and linguistic processing depends on the availability of literal meanings. It is true that only final (conveyed) meaning can be taken as a concrete, observable phenomenon, whereas literal meaning is necessarily a result of theory; but this does not mean that it can be disregarded, since it is a necessary step in the computation of final meaning. After all, [1] can mean simply that I have forgotten your name. Rumelhart also says that the interpretation seems to depend on knowledge well beyond definitions of the terms involved. There are no rules whereby lexical meanings can be combined to generate conveyed meanings. [Rumelhart, 1979, p.76]

I suspect Rumelhart has final meanings, that is, CRs, in mind, and does not pay due attention to other factors which are crucial in their generation. Merely combining lexical (and grammatical) meanings cannot always yield conveyed meanings, but there are rules that define their combinations, so that literal meanings are the product of lexical meanings, plus rules that assemble them into larger units—one example is verb valencies, one of whose effects is precisely assembling lexical meanings into sentence (and phrase) meanings. And, besides, I believe there are rules that relate literal meaning with elements of context, plus previous knowledge, so as to generate CRs (conveyed meanings). In the next section, I offer some suggestions on what these rules may look like. Otherwise, it would be impossible to account for the fact that language users largely agree as to the way specific sentences must be understood— this is one of the factors that make communication possible. That is, CRs are generated on the basis of several sources of information, one of which is literal meaning. Most linguists and psychologists agree, or even assume without discussion, that literal meanings are necessary (cf. Clark and Lucy 1975; Sadock

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1979; Dascal 1987; Moura 2012). Dascal gives some amusing examples from Fonagy (1982), where jokes can only be understood if the receiver has present in his mind both the literal and the final meanings, and concludes: Though there are other mechanisms involved in joke understanding, the devices exemplified above account for a large number of the most effective jokes, and they certainly require a distinction between a conventionalized, more or less compositional, more or less context-free reading of an expression, and a reading that is conveyed in a more indirect way, though eventually grasped more immediately. [Dascal 1987, p. 271]

I believe there are good reasons to keep the traditional distinction between literal and final meaning as valid for the purposes of grammatical description; literal meaning is a necessary step in any kind of “negotiation” between the interlocutors. A sentence like [4] Can you reach that doorknob?

can be filtered through context and end up meaning something like “please open the door”; but it cannot mean “please tell me your name,” as can [1] I forgot your name.

[1] and [4] start from different points, and these points are provided by a previous semantic processing, which includes the literal meaning of the sentence—the part of its meaning that depends on lexicogrammatical factors alone. These linguistic factors are previously coded in memory, either as lexical items or as rules and similar operations. This portion does not depend on any kind of negotiation between the interlocutors: the associations are imposed by language structure, and elephant must mean a particular species of animal for all speakers. The same can be said for details of constructional meaning, such as the requirement that if the

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elephant is the subject of an active sentence whose verb is jump, it must be understood as the Agent of the denoted action. Let us consider another aspect, the illocutionary force of sentences. Take two sentences like [5] Can you keep silent? [6] Did you sleep eight hours last night?

The first can be understood as a command to keep silent; the second cannot convey a command at all. This has to do with the CR each of them conveys. Now, if we turn to literal meaning, they are parallel, in that both can mean a request for information—and this correlates with the presence of a particular intonational contour, marked in writing by the question mark, plus subject–verb inversion. This interpretation is available for both sentences, and is derived through the use of general rules of the language. This shows an asymmetry between the two kinds of interpretation, since only the CR (when markedly different from the literal meaning) is dependent on extralinguistic factors, and cannot be directly correlated with morphosyntactic features of the sentence. In other words, deriving the literal meaning can be done through linguistic operations, and this makes sense because literal meaning is assumed to be the result of linguistic rules applied in a context-free situation.

3.2.3 F rom literal meaning to cognitive representation Now, a question that arises is how, exactly, do we go from the literal meaning of an utterance to the intended cognitive representation—for example, how can a hearer understand the sentence [1] I forgot your name.

as meaning “please tell me your name.” As far as I know, the literature offers no detailed answer to this question; I think some preliminary speculation may be useful. The final meaning of [1] must depend on its literal meaning, on one hand, and also

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on other factors having to do mainly with the situation in which the sentence is uttered. Suppose the process goes like this: we start by computing from [1] the literal meaning, that is, “your name has dropped out of my memory”; this will be sufficient if we are talking about my memory limitations. But suppose someone says [1] in the context of a conversation about other topics. The hearer may reason like this: (a) he is giving me information about the content of his memory; (b) this has nothing to do with the current topic; (c) therefore I am supposed to understand his sentence in some other way; (d) we have just been introduced, and in fact I do not remember his name; until the final meaning is reached, that is, (z) he is asking me to tell him my name. This is of course a highly informal picture of the process; but it illustrates how elements of the extralinguistic context can be used in order to understand a sentence that otherwise might sound irrelevant for the current conversation. It can be viewed as an application of Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quality, which prevents us to simply assume that our interlocutor is mad and talking nonsense. What matters here is that there is a track from the literal meaning all the way to the final CR; the track is still to be traced in its details, but it must exist. It is not a simple track, though: it involves the active negotiation carried on by interlocutors “on the basis of the physical, linguistic, social, and cultural context” mentioned by Langacker (2008) in the passage quoted earlier. But the process must start from literal meaning; and in certain limiting cases, it stops there, as when one understands [7] It is raining.

as meaning simply that it is raining (not that, say, “we must cancel our picnic”). At present, there is no list of all factors that can participate in this process. It is to be expected that, in principle, any kind of knowledge qualifies, and that the process is not purely linguistic: it is part of our constant effort to make sense of the world. Step (b) in the progression, that is, “this has nothing to do with the current topic,” is particularly important because it illustrates a point

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where the hearer detects a break in the adequacy of literal meaning to the present situation. This sets him on the search for other roads that will allow the building of a more sensible and coherent cognitive representation. I suspect that this perception of a break in adequacy is at the root of the understanding of metaphors.10 Suppose someone says that [8] George became a hippo.

Why is this sentence necessarily understood as metaphorical? Precisely because the hearer detects a basic inadequacy (the “break” mentioned above): no person becomes a hippo in real life. The hearer must therefore find a way to attach a reasonable meaning to this sentence: perhaps George became too fat, for instance. Of course (as pointed out by Lakoff and Johnson 1980), this happens very often, although I would not go as far as to hold that we live by metaphors.11 Returning to our main theme, notice how even in a case like [8], the first step must be the computation of literal meaning—it is from the recognition of its pragmatic ill-formedness that the meaning-searching process is launched.

3.2.4 Semantic roles and ETRs A particularly important example of how one comes to find the meaning of a construction is the processing of semantic roles. The starting point is that semantic roles are not directly observable. That is, upon hearing the sentence [9] The girl ate my porridge.

one does not understand the girl as being the Agent, which is a rather schematic notion; we understand her to be the “eater,” and therefore with a different cognitive relation to the schema evoked by the verb than in  This interpretation of metaphors was already stated by Clark and Lucy (1975), and also by Sadock (1979) and by Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980, p. 82). 11  An example of previously coded cognitive relation is the use of give me a hand, which is an idiom, and learned as such, and not a metaphor. It may have been a metaphor one day, but this is of little interest for the study of the understanding process as it functions synchronically (this is pointed out by Fulgêncio 2008). 10

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[10] The girl made my porridge.

where we have a “maker (of porridge)” instead. On the other hand, these two relations (which we may call elaborate thematic relations, ETRs for short) are treated as one in the grammar of English—they, along with many others, have a common semantic feature, something like “immediate initiator of an event,” and they are coded in similar ways in the constructions of the language. Therefore, it makes sense to give them a collective label, Agent—not an ETR any more, but rather a semantic role. The relation holding between a semantic role and a corresponding ETR is one of elaboration; this means that the semantic role is a hyperonym of the several ETRs that actualize it. For instance, the Agent can be defined as the immediate initiator of an event; it can be elaborated into the immediate initiator of a cooking event, or of an eating event, and so on. As we know, only the ETRs are directly accessible, but semantic roles are necessary because they are mentioned by grammatical rules. On the other hand, I hold that there are ETRs that are not the result of elaboration of semantic roles, but become connected to sentence complements directly; this is assignment by default, to be examined in detail in Chap. 7. Assignment by default must occur (and, I claim, does occur) because all eligible complements must have ETRs at the end of the process,12 although some may lack semantic roles, which are only a grammatical tool to direct the introduction of ETRs. For the moment being, let us just explain better what elaboration is, as far as thematic relations are concerned: the semantic process relating semantic roles and ETRs.

3.2.5 Elaboration The notion of elaboration comes from Langacker (1991, 2008), and is opposed to schematization. His explanation runs like this: Relative is schematic with respect to aunt, and rodent with respect to large brown rat. A schematic characterization is instantiated by any number of 12

 This is the assignment requirement, which is introduced and explained in Chap. 7.

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more specific ones, each serving to elaborate its coarse-grained specifications. [Langacker 2008, pp. 55-56; his emphasis]

Langacker here refers to general notions, but I believe the same relation applies to linguistic units and relations. Thus, one can say that phonetic segments are elaborations of more schematic units, called phonemes: in English, as is well known, [t] and [th] are contextually conditioned instantiations of the phoneme /t/; and only the phonetic elements are directly perceptible, the phoneme being a theoretical construct. When we move to grammatical elements, complications arise, but the basic idea is the same: for instance, the ETRs “eater,” “maker,” and “writer” are all elaborations of the semantic role Agent. Note that in both examples, the grouping of those specific elaborate elements into the schematic one is a language-specific feature: in Hindi, [t] and [th] are assigned to two different phonemes; and in Nahuatl “goal,” “location,” and “source” are all elaborations of one and the same semantic role.13 For our purposes, we can say that elaborate notions are always hyponymic to schematic ones. Taking the example of Agent versus “eater,” the former can be defined as the “immediate initiator of an event”; the latter is the “immediate initiator of an eating event,” and serves to elaborate, in the proper context, the “coarse-grained specifications” of the semantic role. This process is necessary, because schematic relations and units are not directly accessible to perception; our concrete data are made up of elaborate units and relations, and it is up to the language user, on the basis of his linguistic knowledge, to build a more abstract representation made up of schematic ingredients. The lack of a clear distinction between linguistic relations and cognitive ones has led to some confusion in linguistic analysis. For instance, Langacker expresses negative feelings toward the postulation of semantic roles: It is generally assumed that a rigorous linguistic theory has to provide a definitive list of [semantic] roles, and that some element from that inventory should correctly describe each participant’s involvement in any verbal 13  Hindi: sāt “seven,” sāth “with.” For the Nahuatl data, see Launey (1992), commented in Perini (2019, section 2.4.1).

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or clausal relationship; the failure to devise a satisfactory list has been a continuing source of concern. I do not believe, however, that a list of this sort is either necessary or achievable. An inventory of semantic roles can always be refined and articulated into more specific types on the basis of further data or a finer-grained analysis—at the extreme, every verb defines a distinct set of participant roles that reflect its own unique semantic properties (e.g. the subject of bite is a slightly different kind of agent from the subject of chew). Conversely, a role conception is arrived at by abstracting away from the peculiarities of individual examples. Since any kind of commonality provides the basis for a possible schema, and since schematization can be carried to any degree, we should not expect a fixed and limited inventory to accommodate all phenomena in every language. I do not believe that semantic roles are first and foremost linguistic constructs, but rather pre-linguistic conceptions grounded in everyday experience. [Langacker 1991, pp. 284-285]

This is an untenable position, in face of the available evidence. There are strong indications that semantic roles are linguistic relations, although rooted in particularized cognitive relations. Langacker identifies the problem, but does not reach a convenient solution. Here, as in other passages by several authors, the failure to distinguish these two levels of analysis leads to uncomfortable positions of analysis. This distinction is essential, and I have proposed a strict separation of levels (Perini 2015, 2019), which is, however, not a discovery of mine: Schlesinger (1995) does precisely the same when he distinguishes between cases (semantic roles) and notions (ETRs): Grammar […] consists in a mapping from the cognitive level to the formal syntactic one via the semantic level. Cases belong to the semantic level, and they are of course defined in terms of cognitive categories, but they are not primitive cognitive concepts […] Some studies will be reported in this chapter which may serve to throw some light on the question of how people conceive of such case-like categories as Instrument and Agent. The term notions, rather than cases, will be used here for these case-like categories, and the term cases will be reserved for linguistic constructs that function in the grammar. [Schlesinger 1995, pp. 4-5]

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To give an example, we can find in sentences many elaborate relations such as “writer,” “eater,” “killer,” or “kicker”; and certainly these relations are part of the CR signaled by each sentence, helping to tell apart Jim killed the cat from Jim kicked the cat and so on. On the other hand, these relations (and many others) must be subsumed under a common label, Agent (a semantic role), for purposes of grammatical description—for instance, only thus can we state the rule that “Agents are prototypically coded as subjects,” which works for more than 97% of all verbs in Portuguese,14 and possibly also in English; using elaborate relations here would result in an impossibly cumbersome descriptive statement.

3.2.6 Summary Now one may ask: Which feature is part of the literal meaning of [9]: Agent or “eater”? I think both are; here we have an elaboration process that applies obligatorily, since one never understands a schematic Agent, but rather an elaborate “eater,” “maker,” and so on. A semantic role is a hyperonym of a set of ETRs: if a constituent is an “eater,” it necessarily is the Agent. We are not dealing with a dislocation of the meaning to another cognitive domain, but with a relation of elaboration, connecting a schematic notion at one end and a highly specific one at the other. The girl in [9] [9] The girl ate my porridge.

is literally the Agent and just as literally the “eater.” Compare with a case like [11] The students kicked my theories aside.

understood as “the students rejected my theories.” The situation here is different: we cannot describe “kick aside” as a hyponym of “reject”; here we have, as it were, a lateral translation of meaning, from one semantic field to another, that is, from one complex of schemas to another. But the  Counting only those that have an Agent in their diatheses.

14

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relation between Agent and “eater” keeps the elaboration within one semantic field, describable as “immediate initiator of a […] event,” where the gap is filled in by more elaborate notions like “eating,” “making,” “jumping,” “scratching,” “rejecting,” and so on. To use more traditional terminology, we can speak of a metaphor in the case of [11], if we do not recognize kick aside as a previously coded alternative to reject in the language, but not in the case of [9]. Note that only in the latter case is the relation linguistically coded (here, through the valency of eat); metaphor is an extragrammatical phenomenon, and is never systematically marked by grammatical means.

References Bechara, Evanildo. 2009. Moderna gramática portuguesa [A modern Portuguese grammar]. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Clark, H.H., and Peter Lucy. 1975. Understanding what is meant from what is said: A study in conversationally conveyed requests. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14: 56–72. Culicover, Peter W., and Ray S.  Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dascal, Marcelo. 1987. Defending literal meaning. Cognitive Science 11: 259–281. Fonagy, Ivan. 1982. He is only joking. In Hungarian general linguistics, ed. F. Kiefer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. FRAMENET (data) available at framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu. Fulgêncio, Lúcia. 2008. Expressões fixas e idiomatismos do português brasileiro [Fixed expressions and idioms in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: Doctoral thesis, PUC-Minas. Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics volume 3: Speech acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Harris, Zellig S. 1951. Structural linguistics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 2004. Don’t think of an elephant! White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume I, theoretical prerequisites. Stanford University Press. ———. 1991. Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. ———. 2008. Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford University Press. Launey, Michel.1992. Introducción a la lengua y a la literatura náhuatl [Introduction to Nahuatl language and literature]. México: UNAM. Moura, Heronides. 2012. Frames e alternâncias sintáticas: Como o metafórico depende do literal. [Frames and syntactic alternations: How metaphorical depends on literal]. In Cognição, léxico e gramática. [Cognition, lexicon and grammar], ed. Heronides Moura, Mailce B. Mota and Ana Paula Santana. Florianópolis: Ed. Insular. Perini, Mário A. 2015. Describing verb valency: Practical and theoretical issues. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ———. 2019. Thematic relations: A study in the grammar-cognition interface. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sadock, Jerrold M. 1979. Figurative speech and linguistics. In Metaphor and thought, ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale [A course in general linguistics]. Paris: Payot. Schank, Roger C. 1981. Language and memory. In Perspectives on cognitive science, ed. Donald A. Norman. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. Schlesinger, Izchak M. 1995. Cognitive space and linguistic case: Semantic and syntactic categories in English. Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol I: Concept structuring systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2007. Foreword. In Methods in cognitive linguistics, ed. M. González-­ Márquez, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J.  Spivey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

4 Word Classes

4.1 On the Nature of Grammatical Distinctions One hypothesis I explore here is that language utilizes, as a raw material for its rules and units, not just any cognitive distinctions, but distinctions delimited in specifically linguistic terms; these distinctions are discrete and semantically schematic.1

These schematic distinctions are, it is true, based on natural distinctions, but are selected according to linguistic criteria, so that many (in fact, most) natural distinctions end up being linguistically irrelevant— although they may be cognitively relevant, as ingredients of the CR. The situation in the morphosyntactic area is analogous to the one found in phonology, which was clearly formulated early in the twentieth century, and resulted in the distinction between phonemes (or their equivalent)

 As will become clear in what follows, this is not an innovation, but rather a principle adopted, more or less explicitly, and more or less consistently, in most of linguistic research. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. A. Perini, Function and Class in Linguistic Description, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6_4

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and speech sounds.2 This is evidently a hypothesis, and may be refuted; but it deserves a chance, because it is at least as plausible as its opposite, that grammar works on elaborate, “natural” distinctions. Actually, the above hypothesis is much more plausible, in view of what we know about the way languages function. That this hypothesis is not universally accepted even today will be shown further; see also Langacker’s (1991) view on semantic roles, quoted in 3.2.2. On the other hand, Schlesinger (1995) makes a clear split between conceptual and linguistic distinctions, and adds that a conceptual distinction is to be admitted as a case if and only if it subserves the statement of some linguistic regularity. […] Linguistic relevance is language-­specific. A linguistically relevant distinction in one language may be devoid of any effect on syntactic rules in another language. [Schlesinger 1995, pp. 25–26]3

I keep the same distinction, one example being that ETRs are conceptual and semantic roles linguistic. As for the distinctions being discrete, there is strong evidence that, at the grammatical level, continuous distinctions are not necessary. Take the distinction between Agent and Patient: although they are both important in the definition of verb valencies and some grammatical rules, no known grammatical process or verb valency takes into consideration their possible elaborations. For instance, fold and crumple have different ETRs for their participants: “folder”/“folded thing” and “crumpler”/“crumpled thing”, respectively. Yet this entails no difference in grammatical coding: with the verbs fold and crumple, the “folder” and the “crumpler” are coded as the subject, and the “folded thing” and the “crumpled thing” are coded as the object. We can therefore simply state that the subject of fold and crumple is the Agent,4 to be elaborated into the respective ETRs on the basis of internal semantic features of each verb, and similarly for the Patient of these verbs—a situation which we encounter again and again  The analogy with phonology is clearly stated in Chomsky (1965, p. 80).  Schlesinger’s case corresponds to what is called here semantic role. 4  In the transitive construction; in the ergative, the subject is the Patient (the paper folded/crumpled). 2 3

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with a large number and variety of other verbs. This is, to my mind, a strong indication that although the CR is often built upon continuous, fuzzy-bordered ETRs, grammar is not sensitive to them, but rather works on discrete categories, which in this case we represent as semantic roles. There is then no reason to abandon the assumption that grammatical classes are discrete—in which they parallel phonological units, that is, phonemes as against speech sounds.

4.2 What Is a Word Class? 4.2.1 Classes and Functions Classes and functions must be strictly distinguished; the failure to do so, very frequent in grammatical works, has been a great source of confusion. The problem shows for instance in the common assertion that an element of some class “functions” as if it belonged to another class in a certain context. This confusion is found in statements assuming that a word can belong to several classes: we read for instance about transitive verbs that function as intransitives, adjectives in adverbial function, and so on. This is one of the reasons why defining classes (of words, of morphemes, and of phrases) seems so difficult. I will try to make this point clear, and arrive at the conclusion that functions are defined in particular contexts and classes are defined out of context. A very simple intuitive test can be applied by asking questions like (a) What CLASS does the word Charlie belong to? (b) What is the syntactic (or semantic) FUNCTION of the word Charlie? Question (a) is not too difficult—say, we can answer that Charlie is a noun. But question (b) has no possible answer, until we provide a context, because Charlie can have several syntactic and semantic functions: it can be the subject, or the direct object, or the complement of a preposition; and semantically it can be the Agent, the Patient, the Recipient, and so on. A function portrays the insertion of a unit in a grammatical

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environment; Charlie—or, more precisely, the noun phrase [Charlie]NP— is the subject (and the Agent) in [1] Charlie calls once a day.

but not in [2] I call Charlie once a day.

Now, the class a unit belongs to is defined by its functional potential,5 that is, by what the unit can be—the set of functions it can occupy. A unit that is, in some context, occupying one of its possible functions remains capable of occupying other functions, in other contexts. In [1] Charlie is a subject, but it still can be an object in some other sentence (as in [2]). Thus, as context changes, the function of Charlie can also change; but its class is still the same, because a class is defined by potentialities. The set of its possible functions is its functional potential, and defines its class. This necessarily entails that each unit belongs to one and only one class. We cannot speak of a word belonging to one class in a context, and to another in another context; this is a common resource in traditional (and some nontraditional) analysis, but it is incorrect. Even such a great linguist as Otto Jespersen did not escape this confusion, as shown in the following passage: Take the form round: this is a substantive in […] “he took his daily round”, an adjective in “a round table”, a verb in “he failed to round the lamp-­ post”, an adverb in “come round to-morrow”, and a preposition in “he walked round the house”. [Jespersen 1924, p. 61]

What Jespersen’s examples show is that round can have several functions, not that it can belong to several classes. The class round belongs to is the one defined by a relatively ample functional potential, which includes all the functions illustrated in his text.6  This very useful term was introduced, to my knowledge, by Huddleston (1984).  Some authors have come close to this notion, but usually do not carry it to its logical conclusions; see, for instance, Culicover (1999, p. 49), discussing words like either, both and neither, and also Camacho et al. (2014), seen below. 5 6

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The central problem is that function is a syntagmatic relation, while class is paradigmatic.7 Units are stored in memory according to class, that is, according to the functions they can perform. Each unit necessarily belongs to only one class, since the complete set of its functions is only one. And each unit occupies a function (one among its set of possible functions) in each context it appears. Taking Jespersen’s example, round in English can have the functions NP head (his daily round), modifier (round table), VP head (he failed to round the lamp-post), and so on. And it belongs to the class defined by this set of functions.8 This unit is stored in memory, labeled as to the functions it can occupy, so that class membership is part of the set of instructions on how to build constructions. Functions, on the other hand, are part of the constructions themselves. All this shows why it makes no sense to say that an item belongs to one class in a context and to another class in another context. So-called “improper” derivation is not derivation at all, but only a somewhat unclear observation of the fact that many items can occupy several functions: this is the case with Portuguese amigo, which for some grammarians may be a noun (meaning ‘friend’), also appearing as an adjective (meaning ‘friendly’) as an effect of improper derivation. All we have in this case is a word with a relatively complex functional potential. This happens very often in Portuguese, and is even more common in English, as Jespersen’s example of round shows, but does not mean that these items belong to more than one class. This pretty fundamental idea does not seem be widely recognized, though. For instance, Camacho et  al. (2014) offer an interesting panorama of the several structural possibilities of nominals in Portuguese but fail to present an acceptable definition of “nouns” (or “substantives”) as against “adjectives”. Following a general trend, they define these classes in actual context, which we have just seen is incorrect; referring to items like amigo, which in our analysis are nominals with referential and qualificative potential, they state that

 Cf. Saussure (1916, p. 170 ff); paradigmatic relations are called “associative” in Saussure’s text.  Round may be the only item in the language to have this particular functional potential.

7 8

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[some substantives] only allow categorial definition by reference to the structural relations they keep in syntagmatization. For instance, the same lexical item can fit in the substantive or adjective category, this determination being visible only by their structural relations. [Camacho et  al. 2014, p. 19]

These words only fit in more than one class because of an incorrect notion of “grammatical class”, common to this and most other current works on the subject. Camacho et al. define the situation correctly, but fail to draw the correct conclusion as to what “belonging to a class” means. A class is a set of items that share all (or most, or some) features; and these features, as we shall see, can be grammatical or cognitive—they are all necessary if we are to describe the complete set of possible ways to insert a word into a sentence without causing unacceptability. The result, of course, is a very complex matrix of properties, nothing like the eight to twelve classes of traditional grammar; and a grammar of a language, to be practical, will have to deal with approximations, selecting the features that best answer to its descriptive objectives.

4.2.2 An Example A word can be a tremendously complex object. Let us just have a partial view at how the word cat can be classified, as compared with other words of the language. The word cat 1. refers to a thing (unlike lousy): your cat is full of fleas; 2. refers to a concrete thing (unlike beauty); 3. cannot refer to an action (unlike jump); 4. restricts the reference of other words (unlike she): she was a cat lover; 5. has a plural in –s (unlike child); 6. cannot be intensified by very (unlike beautiful); 7. cannot occur before the in an NP (unlike all); 8. can occur after the in an NP (unlike all);

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9. cannot modify a verb (unlike slowly); 10. appears as a part of the idioms to let the cat out of the bag; to rain cats and dogs; 11. has one syllable (unlike finger); 12. is a word of Celtic origin (unlike wolf). This is certainly not a complete list, yet all these features (except numbers 11 and 12) are part of a native speaker’s competence, and are crucial in using the language. Note that several meanings of the word have been disregarded, whenever they do not correspond to grammatical differences: cat is in this respect a relatively simple item, but head can mean a part of the body, an administrative function, a syntactic function, an approximate synonym for mind, the beginning of a text or of a page, one of the sides of a coin; it can also mean ‘go in some direction’, and so on. Most of the features given earlier may play a role in the building of sentences. For instance, feature 1, “refers to a thing”, is what allows a word to be interpreted as the head of an NP—that is, its reference center, which in its turn determines that it is the constituent that governs nominal agreement within the NP.9 The grammatical relevance of features 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 is obvious enough. On the other hand, features 11, “has one syllable” and 12, “is a word of Celtic origin”, while being equally true, have no grammatical significance, and in fact are not part of language knowledge: they are theoretical statements devised by linguists. A word can then be viewed as a complex of features—some phonological, some morphological, some syntactic, some semantic.10 Here I am concerned with grammatically relevant features, but there are many others: for instance, cat is connected in our minds to such schemas as friendship, noise at night, veterinarian, hair on the sofa, and so on, but these connections, while cognitively important, and sometimes crucial for the building of texts, have no grammatical significance. Also, cat has three letters, which may be of interest to a billboard planner, but not to a grammarian.

 See Chap. 10 for a definition of NP head, and the process through which it is identified.  Not to mention etymological, orthographic, stylistic, and other features.

9

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Table 4.1  Functional features of the word cat CAT   Semantics            +physical object            +thing            +animate being            –manner   Morphosyntax            +singular            +NP head            –VP head            +plural in –s            – past tense (and tense oppositions in general)            –verb modifier            –predeterminer position

On the other hand, cat is a thing, a physical object, and an animate being, and does not denote a manner; it is also singular, can be an NP head but not a VP head. All these features are valid for the word cat, and all grammatically relevant; some of these properties are represented in Table 4.1. In the table, ‘+’ means a property that the word can have, ‘–’ a property it cannot have. These features design functions, and are part of the functional potential of the word cat. This is a complex enough matrix, yet it does not come close to expressing everything cat can be, grammatically speaking. The set of all features gives the precise class to which cat belongs, and sets it as different from chemistry, gastric, be, child, and all. We know that these features are linguistically significant because they may be used in the statement of grammatical rules. For instance, the rules describing the structure of a sentence stipulate that a particular word must be the head of the VP11; we know from the earlier mentioned matrix that cat is not eligible. Another grammatical rule describes an NP as having a head, and cat can occupy this position. Yet another rule defines verb agreement, so that we say the cat is here, not *the cat am here, since cat is third person, and so on.  Or something equivalent. Many linguists are skeptical about the need for a VP node, but this is not important here: I refer to the predicate head (a syntactic function). In Mimi is a cat, according to this analysis, the predicate head is not cat, but is. 11

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Each of these rules selects a subset of the features, while ignoring the rest: for the rule defining cat as a possible NP head the fact that it denotes an animate being is of no importance—unlike the fact that it refers to a thing, which is one condition for the application of this rule. Each rule, then, depends on part of the information given in the lexical matrix, and no rule needs all of it. Nevertheless, the whole matrix must be available in the system which is stored in the language user’s memory, because the next rule to be applied may, in principle, make use of any subset of features. We might then ask: What grammatical class does cat belong to? This question is stated in traditional terms, that is, it presupposes that classes are to be understood as sets of items having the same properties. The question can be answered, but the answer is not too interesting: cat belongs to the class made up of items having the same features it has. Thus, cat will probably be a class-mate of rabbit, but not of ox (which has no plural in –s), or chemistry (which is not a physical object), or dog (which can be a VP head: two strangers dog her footsteps).12 A way to make class definitions more interesting is to limit our features to the most important ones, grammatically speaking. The problem, of course, is how to find out exactly which features are “most important”, and this remains a major difficulty: for the moment it must be approached, with due caution, by using traditional insights.

4.3 How Many Classes? 4.3.1 Complexity, and how to Describe it From what was seen in the previous section, it results that the more features we have, the more numerous, and smaller, the classes we define will be. And, since the number and variety of possible features is immense, we may come to a situation of unmanageable complexity. Maurice Gross,

 Webster (1971) gives a verb cat, apparently belonging to nautical jargon; but I am sure very few English speakers use this word in this function nowadays. 12

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when presenting the results of his monumental survey of French verbs, had to admit that Two elements […] belong to the same class when they have the same syntactic properties. For our set of 3000 entries (that is, verbs), this relation yields a set of 2000 classes. Since each class contains an average of 1.5 verbs, it can be said that, in general, there are no two verbs with the same syntactic properties. [Gross 1975, p. 214]

For a grammarian concerned with the description of a language, there is something unacceptable in this solution: it comes close to denying the possibility of relevant generalizations, and reduces the facts of language to an excessive number of idiosyncrasies. The problem arises from Gross’s definition, which requires total identity of properties for the members of each class: this definition is too restrictive, and leads to the somewhat disheartening conclusion given above. Gross is aware of the problem, and notes that the number of classes can be reduced through the recognition of redundancy relations: for instance, there is no need to take into account the properties associated to the object with verbs that only co-occur with one complement (that is, the subject). This is certainly one way to reduce the complexity of the data, but it is basically formal, and leaves a lot to be said; in any case, it may be applied to linguistic description, as we will see in Sect. 4.5. And there are better ways to reduce the number of classes, at the same time making them much more informative in grammatical terms: one such resource has to do with hierarchizing features according to their grammatical usefulness; another derives from the fact that many grammatical features are semantically correlated.

4.3.2 Hierarchizing Features Hierarchizing features according to their grammatical import is admittedly easier said than done; but it is a promising way to make linguistic sense out of the tremendous amount of data and features that we find in

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normal language. Hierarchization of features is crucial for descriptive purposes, and it is also a step in the long way toward the building of an adequate theory of language. Even among grammatically relevant features there are reasons to establish a hierarchy, so that some features are more relevant for description than others. In phonology, as we know, the vowel/consonant dichotomy (with some borderline cases like glides and syllabic sonorants) is universally viewed as important for description. Just what is the reason that makes this particular opposition important?13 The basic reason is that the vowel/consonant dichotomy is needed for the statement of many rules. For instance, in Portuguese only vowels can receive stress; the stress-­assigning rule must count syllables from the end of the word, so that stress falls on one of the last three vowels, and nowhere else. The number of consonants is irrelevant in principle. Another example is that certain sequences of consonants are ruled out (*/tp/, */dt/, */gf/, */bm/, and many others), whereas vowel sequences are quite free. This results, for instance, in the insertion of vowels between two adjacent consonants, whether or not the vowel appears in the written form: lar ‘home’, plural lares, when the regular plural suffix is just –s; advogado ‘lawyer’, pronounced [ɐʤivoˈgadʊ], with regular palatalization of /d/ to [ʤ] before [i], and so on. In view of phenomena like these, it is hard to imagine a phonological description of the language that does without the vowel/consonant dichotomy; we conclude that these are particularly important properties among others that also contribute to describe the phonetic aspect and phonological behavior of each phoneme (rounding, stridency, backness, etc.). As seen, a hierarchy may be established among features, some being clearly more relevant for description. The situation is about the same with syntactic and semantic features. Here more research is needed before we can offer definite examples, but some indications are already available. For instance, words like livro ‘book’, amigo ‘friend, friendly’, isso ‘this’, and ela ‘she’ all have a feature

 In the following exposition, I take a consonant to be a [−syllabic] segment, a vowel a [+syllabic] one. 13

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allowing them to occur as subject of a sentence,14 and also as complement of a preposition; besides, the first two can occur preceded by an article, the last two cannot; and, finally, only the last one is grammatically feminine, the others being masculine.15 Now, the first of these features governs the building of the sentence, which is a particularly important construction of the language, in points like verbal agreement and the position of NPs within the construction; while the other two collaborate in the building of NPs in comparatively secondary ways and deal, so to speak, with details of the construction.

4.3.3 Semantic Correlation Turning to the semantic face, we know that lexical items may be potentially referential (Jim, table, he, that), or not (is, entire, without, have, the). Let us refer to these two groups by using the features [+R] (potentially referential) and [−R], respectively: only the former can occur as NP heads. [+R] words are particularly important, because they provide the basic information about the meaning of the NP—an NP being, as is known, the instrument used to refer to things in the sentence. Accordingly, every NP contains at least one [+R] word. This means that the dichotomy [+R] versus [−R] is particularly important—more so than, for instance, the dichotomy “animate” versus “inanimate”, or “qualificative” versus “nonqualificative”—which, by the way, are in a way subordinate to the higher features, since for instance only [+R] items can be “animate”, and so on. We have here then some criteria useful for hierarchizing features; the resulting hierarchy is grammatically relevant in the measure that some grammatical functions depend on semantic features (as the function “NP head” depends on the presence of a [+R] item). I suspect that a survey of the literature will end up showing many examples of such hierarchies, some of them captured by grammarians, and more or less clearly stated in an intuitive way; one of our tasks for the future will be to identify these  More precisely, as head of a subject NP.  Isso ‘this’ is grammatically masculine, because one must say isso é perigoso ‘this is dangerous [masc.]’. The so-called masculine gender is actually the unmarked one, as shown by Martin (1975). 14 15

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examples, add new ones, state them in clear terms, and ascertain in as precise a way as possible their grammatical import. But there is another aspect of these features that relates not to linguistic signs, but to the denoted objects themselves: a word is [+R] whenever it is the name of a thing, or anaphorically refers to a thing, an information which is nonlinguistic (a table and John are things, independently of the language we are studying). This and she, although not being exactly “names” of things, refer to things, and the reference is often recoverable by the application of rules of anaphora. This means that the feature [+R] and consequently [−R] do not need to be independently learned for each lexical item one acquires. I suspect that this kind of correlation is extremely widespread, and represents a significant factor of economy in the use of features; it is something that deserves detailed investigation. For the time being, all one can offer is some suggestions; I definitely think that the semantic feature [R] must be taken into account when classifying lexical items in Portuguese—not only for its semantic profile, but also because an important syntactic function, NP head, depends on it for its definition. Words, therefore, split into [+R] and [−R] in Portuguese. But this does not mean that this opposition can be used in order to define the traditional class of nouns; that is, it is not the case that all items marked [+R] are “nouns”, if we are to take this class in its traditional extension. We shall see in Sect. 4.5 that in this particular point traditional analysis is mistaken, and too simple to account for the facts as they can be observed. This does not detract from the importance of the feature, but it must be viewed in a different perspective, resulting in a very different analysis of the set of items traditionally called “nouns”.

4.3.4 Traditional Intuition about Features The idea that the grammatical behavior of lexical items must be described in complex terms, not simply by assigning each of them to a class or subclass, is not entirely new; but, to my knowledge, it has not been carried all the way to its consequences, nor has it been duly integrated into a coherent frame.

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The generative position in the 1980s and 1990s made some use of a feature system, based on the features N, V, A, P: […] the central morpheme categories “X” have been determined to be the noun, verb, adjective, and preposition (X= N, V, A, P). [Emonds 1985, p. 1]

But some problems detract from the usefulness of this approach, mainly: (a) the lack of a serious attempt to define the features in nonformal terms, that is, as representing cognitive categories, such as defining an “N” as a referential item; (b) a system that is too simple, with its four features, to account for the much greater complexity of the observed facts; and (c) a tendency toward dogmatic acceptance of the list, without systematically challenging it against empirical data, which might lead to a greater number of better-defined features. In fact, the feature system as it is applied looks excessively theory-bound, and is often only a means to illustrate the application of rules which are taken as given without much discussion, and without a definite effort to ground them on observed facts in significant quantity. Nongenerative linguistics sometimes shows a perception of the problem, but fails to reach a convenient solution for lack of a suitable theoretical frame. Besides placing single items in several classes (which as we saw is incorrect), it resorts to subcategorizing, as for instance in the several kinds of “adverb”: Let us turn now to the syntax of adverbs. […] A prototypical adverb can modify a VP, an adjective or another adverb, but we have noted that not all adverbs have this property. […] The other dimension distinguishes various types of dependent function, such as degree modification, manner modification, and so on. [Huddleston 1984, pp. 334–335]16

Huddleston gives the following “types of dependent function” for adverbs: degree, manner, time, place. And he adds that

 Huddleston’s work is taken as an example because of its high degree of lucidity and coherence; with usual school grammars the subject is treated in a most obscure way. 16

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[…] there are two important closed classes which cut across the primary part-of-speech classification to include a few adverbs as well as certain pronouns and determinatives. Adverbs belonging to the class of ‘wh’ words […] are how (degree or manner/means), when (time), where (place), why (reason) […]. [Huddleston 1984, p. 335]

Here Huddleston shows understanding of the feature overlapping that is so widespread in word classification. But his exposition is not sufficiently clear: a further step is missing, which analysis by features provides. When Huddleston says that not all adverbs have the property of modifying an adjective, he is in fact referring to functional features of the kind we have been considering. The weak point in the reasoning is the assumption that these words we are analyzing are “adverbs”, when no operational definition for this class is available that does not make use of the feature “adjective modifier”. I would rephrase his statement as “not all words have the property of modifying an adjective”, showing that we are adopting a more inductive stance, and searching for the application of each feature to lexical items in general. Adverbs are usually understood as single words that have adverbial usage—“adverbial usage” being defined in a most summary way; for example, Greenbaum (1969) links the notion of adverb to the function of adjunct, which is defined as those constituents of a clause that are not Subject, Verb, or Complement. [Greenbaum 1969, p. 1]

Adjuncts, in this conception, are modifiers of verbs or verb phrases; Greenbaum adds that [a]dverbs may, of course, have functions other than those of Adjunct. For example, an adverb may modify an adjective, as suprisingly in His proposals had a surprisingly great effect. [Greenbaum 1969, p. 2, note 1]

In spite of the simplicity of the definition, adverbs have a wide range of different functions—something that Greenbaum’s book leaves clear

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enough.17 For the moment, I will merely mention that the idea of analysis by features frequently underlies traditional analysis; what is lacking is, I suspect, the decision to follow this intuition all the way to its logical consequences, which entails a major restating of this chapter in the grammar.

4.4 Counting Words Items like get, with its several meanings (she got the prize; Jim got arrested by the police; I don’t get your point; she got home very late), present a problem: are we to analyze them as one word with several meanings or as several homonymous lexical items? I will argue that we must define only one word get, with the property of evoking several schemas; and the argument works for all kinds of words, not only for verbs.18 First of all, if we define several verbs get, a methodological problem arises: as is well known, the difference between readings of a verb (and of a word in general) is not always neat, but frequently shows a gradation which comes to very minute distinctions; at the limit, one can argue that eating a biscuit is different from eating porridge. Also, we are usually able to create new readings as needed. For instance, an airplane “flies” in quite a different way than a bird, yet the same verb fly started to be used for both when the first airplanes were built; and we can say she flew out of the room to express speed, not actual flight, and so on.19 This means, at the very least, that we are often unable to draw the semantic boundaries between the readings of a verb: how many verbs fly are there in English? These differences depend on elaboration, and this kind of elaboration in its turn depends on extralinguistic information.20

 I consider “adverbs” more at length in Chap. 12.  These ideas were first presented in Perini (1999). 19  Calling such readings “metaphorical” explains nothing: first, because one must choose one reading, arbitrarily, as the “basic” one, from which so-called metaphors are derived; and, second, because it is based on an incorrect concept of metaphor, since uses like this plane flies to Madrid rely on a reading of fly previously encoded in the language, not on one improvised on the spot, which would be a true metaphor. 20  See Sect. 3.2.5 for the notion of elaboration. 17 18

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But the main argument against analyzing get as several verbs is theoretical: it defeats the main objective of linguistic analysis, which is to relate forms and meanings. When we speak of the several verbs get, we are not referring to formal, sensorially perceptible units, but to theoretical constructs; we still have to state somewhere in the description that these several verbs are realized as one and the same morphological and phonological unit, with a unique phonetic realization. If this analysis is adopted, the unit we call “a verb” will not be very useful: we will have many sets of homonyms, and each set will be composed of units that have the same phonological representation—and, furthermore, the same morphological features, since all the get’s make their past tense got, gerund getting, and so on. If we admit many verbs get, we will be forced into strange statements like “all verbs of the form get are irregular, and make their past tense got”. For these reasons I prefer to speak of one verb having several meanings (i.e., being able to evoke several schemas), rather than speaking of several verbs, each having its own meaning, but the same pronunciation and morphology. A “word” is defined as a unit phonologically represented in a unique way. Get is one verb, and one entry in the valency dictionary, although it can evoke several schemas, and occur in several diatheses. Or, to be more precise, get is a word, and got, gets, and getting are different words, all belonging to the same lexeme,21 which we may call “the verb get”. The same reasoning applies to other kinds of words: thus, head has a different syntax and semantics in my head hurts, the head of the rebellion, win by a head, he got these stupid ideas into his head, the head of the page, head of an NP, I head straight for the bar, and so on. Yet since the phonetic form (the starting point in interpretation) is the same, we will call all these cases occurrences of the word head, which in each case has a different meaning and/or a different grammatical behavior. This comes from a concern to express the connection between sound (image acoustique) and meaning (concept), which is usually, and correctly, taken to be the basic object of linguistic analysis. It is obvious enough that the different meanings and grammatical properties of words must be described; yet defining separate, but formally 21

 Or lemma.

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identical, lexical items is not the best way to do it. To show this with a minimal, schematic example: if we define our units as (formal) words plus readings, we will have to state the following elements: two (or more) “words”; a corresponding number of meanings; and one morphological and phonological representation for both. Let us take as an example the word strike, which can mean ‘hit’ and also ‘cause an impression’, as in these ideas strike me as unlikely. At first we may want to represent this as phonological verb (lexeme) form /ˈstraɪk/

meaning (schema)

strike1

HIT

strike2

CAUSE.IMPRESSION

But there is a redundancy in this presentation: the duality of meanings is represented twice, first as two verbs, then as two meanings. We can express exactly the same thing, and keep faithful to observed facts, in a simpler way, provided that we analyze strike as one verb instead of two. The presentation will be reduced to phonological verb (lexeme) form /ˈstraɪk/

strike

meaning (schema) HIT CAUSE.IMPRESSION

The second solution becomes even more attractive when we note that strike is morphologically the same in both cases—that is, there is no inflectional difference between strike in one or the other meaning. The second solution is not only more economical, but also intuitively more satisfying. It amounts to saying that one verb, strike, has the property of evoking more than one schema (HIT, CAUSE.IMPRESSION …), which is, of course, an extremely common property of lexemes. We may observe that human processors must start with the phonetic chain before establishing lexemes; for this reason it is more convenient to count words as phonological units, and lexemes as morphosyntactic units: strike is one

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word and one lexeme (i.e., one verb), with several meanings. With the second representation given earlier, we place the duality where it belongs, namely in the meaning (schema), rather than in the morphology. This is not a minor problem: for instance, if we adopt the each-reading-is-anew-­verb hypothesis, how many verbs get, or set, are there in English? Or how many “words” with the form top (‘upper end’, ‘high-quality’, ‘high social status’, ‘choicest part’, ‘spinning toy’, ‘strike a golf ball over the center’, etc.)? Observe how some of these readings are semantically related, so that telling them apart (as a new “word”) may not be easy. Things are not always simple as they appear in the figures above. The phonological sequence strike/ˈstraɪk/ can also evoke another schema, WORK.STOPPAGE, in this case with different syntactic properties, so that we have [3] They strike the ball. [4] These ideas strike me as unlikely.

but also [5] The strike is over. The figure must then be completed as phonological form

lexemes strike [V]

/ˈstraɪk/

strike [N]

meaning (schema) HIT CAUSE.IMPRESSION WORK.STOPPAGE

The word appears in the first step in the progression22; this step is necessary, for the reasons mentioned earlier. As for the second (lexeme), it is the result of some processing, which in turn depends on linguistic  The figures are to be read left to right; but this does not entail any claim about the way they are processed in real time: this is only a way to represent knowledge to which the language user has global and simultaneous access. 22

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knowledge; and here we have two lexemes, since, although the verb strike is the same regardless of meaning, the noun strike differs from the verb in its morphology and other grammatical properties. And the third (meaning) is associated with the lexeme, not directly with the word. The second step has only two lexemes, because both meanings ‘hit’ and ‘cause.impression’ are conveyed by the same phono-morphological entity, so that we have in the figure one word, two lexemes, and three meanings (three evoked schemas). The lexeme, as seen, is actually a class of words, since morphological variation implies the association of several words (strike, strikes, struck, striking). This is the way these terms are used in this book. Internally, lexemes are very regular in what concerns the syntactic and semantic relations between their members—for instance, we find exactly the same semantic relations in help, helps, helped, helping as in strike, strikes, struck, striking. Morphologically, as is well known, lexemes are much less regular. I realize that the way a word is defined here may be unpalatable to many linguists. Some people may find it odd that a word often lacks semantic coherence; for example, the word sound has two very different meanings in [6] I like to hear the sound of the rain. [7] She gave sound advice on this matter.

Yet we must analyze the sequence sound as the same unit at some level, since at some stage in the processing of the utterance there is in fact no difference. Distinctions are added by reference to the lexicon and the grammar of the language. Note also that the difference in meaning between sound in [6] and [7] is not amenable to generalization, being rather a property of the uses of this particular word. Yet the fact remains that both in [6] and in [7] the interpretation process begins with the phonetic sequence sound, that is, [ˈsaʊnd]. This is, I think, a fact, and an important one, because it ensures that a relation is established between sound and meaning, which is a basic feature of language.23  Of course, the fact that the two readings of sound represent two distinct etymological units is not relevant here, since we are concerned with the synchronic use of the language. 23

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4.5 Classes as Bunches of Properties Let us now have a look at the use of features in the definition of word classes.24 As an initial example, I take some words traditionally classed as “nouns” and “adjectives”; we shall see that the traditional classification, besides being theoretically incorrect, is too simple to account for the complexity of the facts. The discussion is based on Portuguese data, which are the ones I have studied intensively, but the facts of English are not really different, and the exposition is, mutatis mutandis, valid for English data as well.

4.5.1 R Words, Q Words, and R&Q Words We may start with the word barulho ‘noise’. Traditionally it is analyzed as a noun (or “substantive”); let us see what this means. First of all, barulho is the name of a thing, unlike gástrico ‘gastric’, perto ‘near’, esse ‘this’, and ali ‘there’. This semantic property is correlated with the syntactic one of being able to appear as an NP head, as in [8] [Esse barulho]NP não me deixou dormir.     ‘that noise didn’t let me sleep’

Let us designate this semantic property with the symbol ‘R’ (for “potentially referential”); barulho is, then, positively marked for this feature: barulho [+R]. This feature must be known by any user of the Portuguese language: if someone does not know that barulho ‘noise’ can be the name of a thing, he simply does not know the language. All speakers of the language know that [8] is a correct sentence, and what it means. Other words do not have this feature: for instance, sufocante ‘oppressive’ (as in calor sufocante ‘oppressive heat’) is not the name of a thing, which is the reason why this sentence is strange:  To avoid complicating the text, I use the term “word classes” as including lexeme classes, whenever no confusion can arise. 24

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[9] * O sufocante me incomodava.     ‘* the oppressive made me uncomfortable’.

We then mark this word (traditionally an “adjective”) negatively for the feature R: sufocante ‘oppressive’ [−R]. The main semantic function of sufocante ‘oppressive’ in the language is to restrict the reference of [+R] words. That is, starting with a [+R] word, like calor ‘heat’, we can restrict its denotation by using sufocante ‘oppressive’. We express this by saying that sufocante has the feature [+Q] (‘Q’ stands for “reference-restrictive”).25 We can easily verify that barulho does not have the property Q; we then mark the two words as barulho ‘noise’ [+R, −Q] sufocante ‘oppressive’ [−R, +Q] We have so far done nothing more than formalize information found also in traditional grammar: barulho ‘noise’ is a noun (because it designates a thing), and sufocante ‘oppressive’ is an adjective (because it restricts the reference of a noun). If things were that simple, traditional analysis would be acceptable in this particular. But things are not that simple. The word mexicano ‘Mexican’ does not fit in either of the two classes defined earlier. The problem, semantically speaking, is that mexicano is the name of a thing, and also restricts a reference, so that we can say [10] Aquele mexicano telefonou ontem.     ‘that Mexican called yesterday’ [11] A notícia saiu em um jornal mexicano.     ‘the news came out in a Mexican newspaper’.

In [10] mexicano denotes a thing (a person). In [11] the denoted thing is jornal ‘newspaper’, and mexicano restricts its reference: we are not  The semantic feature in question is “restriction of the reference of the head of its construction”. Using RR for “reference-restrictive” would be confusing, since I already use R, so I use Q, although these items are not always qualificative. 25

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59

referring to just any paper, but to a Mexican one. This word must then be marked positively for both features: mexicano ‘Mexican’ [+R, +Q].

The grammatical behavior of mexicano, then, is different from both barulho and sufocante—we ask then: Which class does this lexeme belong to? is it a noun? or an adjective? If we want to keep the traditional dichotomy we have a problem: the data we examined leave it clear that these three lexemes have different grammatical (semantic and syntactic) properties—these properties define three kinds of lexemes, not just two. A solution sometimes used in grammars is to say that mexicano is a noun in [10] and an adjective in [11]. But this fails to keep the crucial distinction between classes and functions, for it defines these classes in context, which we already know is not correct (as seen in Sect. 4.2.1). We are trying to find out which are the potentialities of each word, in order to explain how speakers can insert them in their adequate contexts. Defining them in context is tantamount to saying that mexicano is a noun when it occurs in the context of a noun (for instance, as an NP head). But how did the speaker learn that she could insert that word (and not sufocante) in that context? Because sufocante cannot be a noun, and cannot occur in that context. This explanation is circular and leads us nowhere. But there is no need to preserve the traditional analysis. It could be wrong, and in this particular case it is; we must recognize that the facts are more complex than they appear in traditional grammar. We therefore admit that these three words belong to three classes, as far as the two features R and Q are concerned: barulho belongs to the class defined as [+R, −Q] sufocante –” – [−R, +Q] mexicano –” – [+R, +Q] and, of course, a word like ou ‘or’ belongs to a class partially defined as [−R, −Q], because it is neither the name of a thing nor a reference restrictor. The features R and Q are semantic; and, as we have seen, they closely correspond to syntactic functions. This works for this particular example, but we should not jump to the conclusion that syntax and semantics

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Table 4.2  Three classes of words defined by the features R and Q Examples

R Q

amigo ‘friend(ly)’, velho ‘old’, negro ‘black’, cachorro ‘dog/unfaithful’, + + cardíaco ‘cardiac/heart patient’, mexicano ‘Mexican’ mão ‘hand’, garfo ‘fork’, nuvem ‘cloud’, barulho ‘noise’ + − gástrico ‘gastric’, paternal ‘paternal’, mole ‘soft’, sufocante ‘oppressive’ − +

always go together. Available evidence suggests that the relation between the levels varies very much, and all we can do for now is examine individual cases. In many areas (e.g., as in verb valency) the parallelism is only partial, and there is a great number of cases where syntax cannot be predicted from semantics (despite some assertions to the contrary; see Sect. 5.2). In some cases traditional classes are of little use. In Portuguese at least, it seems impossible to define nouns as opposed to adjectives, because of the great number of items that are [+R, +Q], alongside items [+ R, −Q] and [−R, +Q]. Some further examples are given in Table 4.2. Note in particular the opposition between cardíaco, which can be a reference restrictor (doença cardíaca ‘heart disease’) and also refer to the patient (um cardíaco ‘a heart patient’) and gástrico, which only has the former function, so that one cannot say *um gástrico to refer to a gastric disease patient. Another interesting case is maternal, which applies to a quality, and also to a nursery school, while paternal only refers to a quality. These examples illustrate the partly accidental nature of the functional potential of many words. The table is stated in semantic terms (R, Q) but, as we know, it has syntactic import as well, because here (not everywhere!) the semantics goes with the syntax, so that we can say that if an item is [+R] it can appear as an NP head, and vice versa; if a word is [+Q] it can appear as a modifier (but not vice versa, as modifiers can be expressed by longer constructions); and items [+R, +Q] can be NP heads and modifiers. If we keep these two features as definitory for classes, we must drop the dichotomy noun/adjective in Portuguese, since we need three, not two, classes in order to categorize these items. Furthermore, some words traditionally called pronouns, like eu ‘I’, você ‘you’, nós ‘we’, alguém ‘someone’ will come under the second group mentioned earlier, [+R, −Q]; other items also called pronouns, such as alguns ‘some’, esse ‘this’, aquele ‘that’, will belong to the third group,

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[−R, +Q].26 We may try to use other features to refine the analysis, but any such refining is unlikely to bring us closer to traditional classes; classification in this area of the lexicon is in definite need of a general overhaul.

4.5.2 Use of the Article The two features we saw in the preceding section classify a great number of “nominal” items, but do not come close to describing their grammatical behavior in its entirety. Let us have a look at the word Portugal. At first sight it seems very similar to barulho ‘noise’, because after all Portugal is a thing (a country), and is not a quality. We have then. Portugal [+R, −Q]. By these two features Portugal is in fact identical to barulho. But if we take into account other grammatical properties there are differences: we can use the article o ‘the’ with barulho, as seen in. [8] O barulho não me deixou dormir.     ‘the noise didn’t let me sleep’.

but with Portugal this is not possible: [12] * O Portugal vai jogar amanhã contra o Canadá.     ‘[*the] Portugal is playing tomorrow against Canada’.

We must say instead [13] Portugal vai jogar amanhã contra o Canadá.     ‘Portugal is playing tomorrow against Canada’27

Portugal and barulho are then different in grammatical behavior, for only the latter can occur with the article.28 We may express this with a  This detail is recognized in traditional Portuguese grammar, which distinguishes between “substantive pronouns” and “adjective pronouns”. 27  Note that Canadá does accept the article; a similar case in English is England versus the United States, the Gambia. 28  There are contexts in which Portugal occurs with an article; but this is not relevant here, because our point is that these words are different, and barulho accepts the article where Portugal does not. 26

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Table 4.3  Nominals: four words, four classes Amigo ‘friend(ly)’ Barulho ‘noise’ Portugal Sufocante ‘oppressive’

R

Q

Art

+ + + −

+ − − +

+ + − −

feature, say [Article], which means the property of occurring preceded by an article, and nothing else, in an NP. The words we are examining are then classified as given in Table 4.3. We have so far four words and four classes, because no two of them show exactly the same grammatical behavior. I am using semantic and syntactic features here, but there is no problem in this as long as we keep them distinct: grammatical behavior includes both formal and semantic factors (the feature [Art] has no semantic correlation).29

4.5.3 Old Clowns Another classificatory feature, of a subtler nature, is responsible for the difference between [14] Um velho palhaço    ‘an old clown’ or ‘a clownish old man’.

and [15] Um palhaço velho    ‘an old clown’, but not ‘a clownish old man’.

[14] is ambiguous, [15] is not. The only syntactic difference is the order of the nominals, velho ‘old’ and palhaço ‘clown’; in other words, [14] has two thematic analyses30:  The feature [–Article] for sufocante is redundant, because it is valid for all [−R] items.  Let us adopt the convention that when a feature has a signal (+R, −Q) we are dealing with the potential of the unit; when it has no signal (R, Q), we refer to the feature composition of the unit in the context given. That is, ‘+R’ means “has the potential of being R”; ‘R’ means “is R in the present structure”. 29 30

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[16] Um velho palhaço        Q     R   or         R  Q

whereas [15] only admits [17] Um palhaço velho         R  Q

How can we describe this? Both items, velho and palhaço, must be marked [+R], and also [+Q]. But if that were all, [17] would have to be ambiguous, and it is not. The difference is that palhaço can be [Q] only if it occurs after the NP head, whereas velho can be [Q] in either position. This explains why [16] can refer to an old man (of any profession) who behaves clownishly, or to a circus artist who is aged, while [17] must refer to a circus artist. As seen, the features [R] and [Q] are not sufficient here; we need another feature, referring to the property of being [Q] when positioned before the NP head. Actually, as will be seen in Sect. 10.4, the impossibility of placing palhaço before the head comes from the syntactic features of this item, which allow it to occur in the head function, and also as a modifier, but not in what will be called the pre-head modifier. Pre-head modifiers are usually [+Q], but this is not sufficient; an item must also be positively marked for that syntactic function. If we complete Table 4.3 with the items velho and palhaço, as well as the feature PHMod (for “pre-­ head modifier”), then we get Table 4.4. Only two of these six items are identical, amigo and palhaço: the six items belong to five different classes, and none of the four features coincides with any other in the way it classifies the words. The traditional dichotomy adjective/noun, even with its subdivisions, is clearly unable to deal with all the grammatically relevant distinctions working in the language.

4.5.4 Prepositions and Conjunctions Another example of complex classification is found with prepositions. As an informal definition, let us call prepositions those words (and certain word sequences, like por causa de ‘because of ’) which, placed before an

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Table 4.4  Nominals: six words, five classes Amigo ‘friend(ly)’ Barulho ‘noise’ Portugal Sufocante ‘oppressive’ Velho ‘old; old man’ palhaço ‘clown(ish)’

R

Q

Art

PHMod

+ + + − + +

+ − − + + +

+ + − − + +

− − − + + −

NP, make up an adverbial or adjective phrase.31 These items are studied at some length in Chap. 11, where I consider connectives as a group; here I only give some interesting facts that show the problems inherent in the traditional taxonomy. Thus, in [18] O apartamento de Pedro    ‘Pedro’s apartment’

the sequence de Pedro, a preposition plus an NP, is an adjective phrase, conveying the semantic feature [Q]; and in [19] Vou viajar com Pedro     ‘I am going on a trip with Pedro’.

com Pedro is an adverbial phrase, denoting a Company. As seen, then, de and com are prepositions according to our definition. Now let us define a conjunction as a word that, placed before a tensed sentence, makes up a nominal or an adverbial clause32: [20] Mamãe disse que vai chover.     ‘Mom said that it is going to rain’ [21] Mamãe riu quando eu caí.     ‘Mom laughed when I fell down’.  “Adjective phrase” and “adverbial phrase” are also taken here in an informal way, roughly corresponding to the traditional use. 32  This definition excludes so-called coordinating conjunctions, which in fact have a very different grammatical behavior (see Chap. 11). A nominal clause is an NP which contains a sentence, and analogously an adverbial clause is an adverbial phrase containing a sentence. 31

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Que vai chover ‘that it is going to rain’ is a nominal clause, and quando eu caí ‘when I fell down’ is an adverbial clause. Que and quando are conjunctions according to the definition given.33 Now let us take the word como ‘like; as; since’. In certain cases it answers to the definition of a conjunction: [22] Como a denúncia não foi confirmada, o prisioneiro foi libertado.     ‘since the accusation was not confirmed, the prisoner was set free’

Como, plus the sentence a denúncia não foi confirmada, make up an adverbial clause, here with the semantic role Cause. But in a sentence like [23] Minha filha toca como Argerich.     ‘my daughter plays like Argerich’

como appears before an NP, Argerich, and the sequence is an adverbial phrase—which answers to the definition of preposition. What class, then, does como belong to? Or do we need a third class for this and similar words? A traditional analysis insists that como is always a conjunction, and analyzes [23] as containing an anaphorically reduced clause, … como Argerich toca ‘… like Argerich plays’. This kind of argument is open to very serious objections: it finds a clause where no verb is to be found; but a clause is, in all analyses, a linguistic, not a cognitive unit. We may have two references to the schema PLAY, but all attempts to base grammatical analysis directly on schemas have failed, mainly because violating the methodological separation between formal and cognitive units always leads to confusing situations. If como Argerich in [23] is a clause, what is a clause? Is com mamãe ‘with Mom’ a clause in [24] Alice viajou com mamãe.     ‘Alice went on a trip with Mom’.

since understanding [24] necessarily entails understanding that Mom also went on a trip? This kind of analytic resource is impossible to constrain, and will eventually lead to confusion between concepts (schemas)  The word que has a host of other functions; to keep things simple, let us limit our consideration to its conjunctional function. 33

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and linguistic expressions. Actually, this solution seems to have been devised merely in order to rescue the traditional classification of como as a conjunction in all cases. And another solution sometimes appealed to is to analyze como as a conjunction in [22] and a preposition in [23]. We already saw that this is equally inadequate (see Sect. 4.2.1). The way to avoid all these problems is to analyze como as having the features we traditionally associate with prepositions, plus the features associated with conjunctions: in other words, como can both precede an NP and precede a clause; for this particular word, the result is always an adverbial clause. I have organized these observations in Table 4.5, with the following conventions: the symbol ‘Cn’ (for connective) means that the resulting sequence (in parentheses) has a different functional potential, that is, belongs to a different class, than the unit which follows the connective. Thus, (~NP)Cn means ‘before an NP, resulting in a non-­ NP’.34 Of course, this is just an abbreviation, because the result is not only a non-NP, but more precisely an adjective phrase, or an adverbial phrase. This is relevant in order to describe the properties of individual prepositions: with com ‘with’ the result is an adverbial phrase, with de ‘of ’ it is often an adjective phrase: respectively, com Pedro ‘with Pedro’ and de Pedro ‘Pedro’s’ as in o carro de Pedro ‘Pedro’s car’. It is also necessary to discriminate between “conjunctions” that make up adverbial phrases and those that make up nominal phrases; that is, the feature (~S)Cn is not sufficient to describe the facts, and should be replaced by, say, (~S) Cn~NP (e.g., que ‘that’) and (~S)Cn~AdvP (e.g., quando ‘when’). This is recognized, in a way, in traditional grammar, when it subclassifies conjunctions into ‘integrating’, ‘temporal’, and so on. But for our immediate

Table 4.5 Partial functional potential of some connectives

Com ‘with’ Quando ‘when’ Como ‘like; as; since’

(~NP)Cn

(~S)Cn

+ − +

− + +

 I use ‘~’ for ‘before, and in construction with’, instead of the more usual, but inelegant, underline ‘_’. 34

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purposes we can disregard this elaboration, and limit ourselves to the general indication ‘Cn’. If we use these conventions, connectives will be analyzed as shown in the examples in Table 4.5. The pluses and minuses define the functional potential of each item, so that the first line of the table should be read “com can appear before an NP, resulting in a non-NP; and cannot appear before a tensed sentence, resulting in a non-sentence”. A bit long but, I trust, not too difficult to understand. The table adequately describes the behavior of these three words in what respects their function of building adjective and adverbial phrases out of NPs and clauses.35 But it also shows that the dichotomy preposition/conjunction must be abandoned; we must refer to functional features like (~NP)Cn instead. We have here another example of the need to classify lexical items in terms of their functional potential, not in terms of discrete, non-overlapping word classes in the traditional way. Our examples show that classes most often work in a non-hierarchical way, which will be amply confirmed by other examples along this work. The literature contains solutions that depend on hierarchically organized classes and subclasses, as for example […] we propose the term “superclass” [superpartie du discours] to designate a set of classes, otherwise distinct, that have the same functions. […] The classes in a language compose a set which is structured and hierarchically organized into superclasses, classes, and also […] “subclasses” […]. [Lemaréchal 1989, p. 27]

It is easy to see that such an organization of classes within classes fails to account for our data.

4.5.5 Valential Classes of Verbs Valential classes are examined in Chap. 8; here I give an example in order to illustrate the use of features in classification: 35

 The two functions of como are distinguished in English: since versus like.

68  C1 C2 C4

M. A. Perini VSubj>Agent VSubj>Agent VSubj>Patient

V V V

NP>Patient

The verb cozinhar, as well as its English counterpart cook, occurs in all three diatheses: [25] O Dani cozinhou a batata.    Agent        Patient     ‘Dani cooked the potato’ (C1) [26] O Dani cozinha.    Agent.    ‘Dani cooks’ (C2) [27] A batata cozinhou.    Patient.     ‘the potato cooked’ (C4).

Now, comer ‘eat’ occurs only in C1 and C2: [28] O Dani comeu as batatas.     ‘Dani ate the potato’ (C1) [29] O Dani comeu.    ‘Dani ate’ (C2).

Comer ‘eat’ cannot have a subject Patient in a construction made up only of subject and verb (C4). Finally, abaixar ‘drop’ can occur in C1 and C4, but not in C2: [30] O Dani abaixou a cortina.     ‘Dani dropped the curtain’ (C1) [31] A cortina abaixou.     ‘the curtain dropped’ (C4).

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Abaixar does not occur with a subject Agent and no Patient (C2). These three verbs have different functional potentials, expressed here by the different sets of diatheses shown by each of them.36 Cozinhar ‘cook’ has C1, C2, and C4; comer ‘eat’ has C1 and C2; and abaixar ‘drop’ has C1 and C4. We may want to add morrer ‘die’, which has only C4, acariciar ‘caress’, which has only C1, and ser ‘be’, which occurs in none of these.37 The result is the familiar situation, a complex classification as given in Table 4.6. As seen, then, valencies work as bunches of features, classifying lexical items in the usual way. And the result is also the usual: a much more complex situation than envisaged by traditional grammar. Portuguese traditional grammar gives five classes of verbs according to transitivity; here, taking six verbs and only three diatheses, we already have six classes. Suppose we want to find the class of verb cozinhar ‘cook’ belongs to: a verb is “transitive” when it includes the necessity […] of being accompanied by a direct object to complete its predication […]. [Camara Jr. 1977, p. 235]

But cozinhar occurs with a direct object, as in [25] and also without it, as in [26] and [27]; and the predication is not incomplete in the last two sentences, which can perfectly well be used independently of any anaphoric reference to a Patient or Agent. If we accept the traditional definition, then cozinhar cannot be transitive or intransitive. Table 4.6  Valency: six verbs, six classes Diatheses

C1

C2

C4

Cozinhar ‘cook’ Comer ‘eat’ Abaixar ‘lower’ Morrer ‘die’ Acariciar ‘caress’ Ser ‘be’

+ + + − + −

+ + − − − −

+ − + + − −

 The set of all diatheses a verb can occur in is its valency.  Here I take only these three diatheses into account; some of these verbs also occur in other diatheses. 36 37

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The real problem is that these two categories are not sufficient to describe the facts; what we need in order to classify verbs as for transitivity is the list of constructions they can occur in.

4.5.6 Searching for Homogeneous Classes There probably are words identical in grammatical behavior, which consequently belong to exactly the same class. When we try to find them, though, we are often surprised at how difficult it is to find such groups. For instance, let us examine mecânico ‘mechanic(al)’. At first sight, it seems to be identical to amigo: amigo [+R, +Q] mecânico [+R, +Q] as shown by sentences like [32] O mecânico me telefonou. [R]     ‘the mechanic called me’ [33] Meu carro tem um defeito mecânico. [Q]     ‘my car has a mechanical problem’

Now, mecânico has a curious semantic peculiarity: when it is used to restrict the reference of a [+R] word, it can attribute a quality to the denoted entity, as in [33], which asserts that the problem is mechanical. In such cases mecânico can also be used as a complement of the verb ser ‘be’, as in [34] O defeito do meu carro é mecânico (e não elétrico).     ‘the problem in my car is mechanical (not electrical)’

But in other cases mecânico restricts reference not by qualifying the [+R] constituent but something else—often an activity performed by the denoted person: [35] Contratamos uma engenheira mecânica.     ‘we have hired a mechanical engineer’

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This sentence does not assert that the engineer is mechanical (a robot), but that she works with engines. In this reading mecânico cannot appear as a complement of the verb ser; the sentence [36] Essa engenheira é mecânica.     ‘this engineer is mechanical’

normally means that she is in fact a robot. This is common with professional designations, such as químico inorgânico ‘inorganic chemist’, físico nuclear ‘nuclear physicist’, linguista indo-europeu ‘Indo-European linguist’, and also espião australiano ‘Australian spy’, which does not have to be an Australian citizen, but only someone who spies for Australia.38 Amigo does not allow this duality of readings: whenever we use it to restrict a reference, it always directly qualifies the [+R] unit. This can be expressed by assigning the feature [Class] (classifier) to words like mecânico in engenheiro mecânico ‘mechanical engineer’, as opposed to [Qual] (qualifier), assigned both to amigo and to mecânico in problema mecânico ‘mechanical trouble’. That is, amigo is [–Class, +Qual], and mecânico is [+Class, +Qual]. And as we add mecânico to our list, we get five items and five classes (Table 4.7). ‘Class’ and ‘Qual’ are both varieties of our feature ‘Q’—two ways in which a word can restrict reference; this means that the feature ‘Q’ is superfluous in the table, and could be omitted in a maximally economical notation: no item seems to exist with the features [+Q, −Qual]. Table 4.7   Qualifiers and classifiers Portugal Barulho ‘noise’ Amigo ‘friend(ly)’ Sufocante ‘oppressive’ mecânico ‘mechanic(al)’

R

Q

Class

Qual

Art

+ + + − +

− − + + +

− − − − +

− − + + +

− + + − +

 This was observed, and partly studied, in Ferris (1993), Chap. 2), and in Perini et al. (1996). A recently observed example is cirurgião robótico ‘robotic surgeon’, that is, someone who uses a robot in surgery. 38

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4.5.7 Chasing Complexity So far, studying only words traditionally named “adjectives” and “nouns”, we have come to five classes. We have arrived at this result by using common properties, known to any speaker, and which are certainly part of their linguistic knowledge. Let us now add one more feature: the property of being “proper”, that is, to refer to a unique entity, not to a set of similar entities. From that point of view Portugal is different from all other words in the table, and is to be marked [+Proper], while the other four words are [–Proper] (“common nouns” in traditional terminology). This opposition has symbolic repercussions: a [–Proper] nominal, when without a determiner in its NP, has generic meaning, as in [37] Barulho incomoda demais.     ‘noise is very bothersome’

This sentence refers to any kind of noise. But with [+Proper] nominals, even alone in the NP, reference is still specific: [38] Portugal recebe bem os turistas.     ‘Portugal receives tourists kindly’

[38] obviously does not refer to “any Portugal”, but to the one entity referred by the word Portugal.39 We can add this feature to our matrix, and get Table 4.8. We still have five classes. But suppose we add Canadá ‘Canada’ to the group. We might think that Canadá, being the name of a country, will function like Portugal; but there is a difference, because although Portugal is used without an article, Canadá, as we saw before, requires an article:

 It can be argued that Portugal cannot appear with an article. But the same phenomenon can be observed with personal names, which can optionally appear with the article: Roberto trabalha demais, or o Roberto trabalha demais, both ‘Roberto works too much’. 39

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4  Word Classes  Table 4.8  Proper and common items Portugal Barulho ‘noise’ Amigo ‘friend(ly)’ Sufocante ‘oppressive’ mecânico ‘mechanic(al)’

R

Q

Class

Qual

Proper

Art

+ + + − +

− − + + +

− − − − +

− + + + +

+ − − − −

− + + − +

Table 4.9  Proper and common items, including Canadá Portugal Barulho ‘noise’ Amigo ‘friend(ly)’ Sufocante ‘oppressive’ mecânico ‘mechanic(al)’ Canadá

R

Q

Class

Qual

Proper

Art

+ + + − + +

− − + + + −

− − − − + −

− + + + + −

+ − − − − +

− + + − + +

[39] O Canadá vai jogar amanhã contra Portugal.     ‘[the] Canadá is playing tomorrow against Portugal’.

Canadá e Portugal, then, are not identical, and once we add Canadá the matrix becomes Table 4.9, and now we have six words and six classes. Good news is that Brasil, Peru, China, and Jamaica, as well as most (not all) country names, function like Canadá, as far as these six features are concerned.40 But we cannot help thinking: where will this stop? Are we going to need a separate class for each word? I suspect these questions are too influenced by the traditional notion of classes. In the discussion that follows, I hope to show that although complexity is real, there are ways to describe it in a more efficient way than by multiplying classes.

4.5.8 Shortcuts We have already seen that there is a whole system of entailments of the kind “if a word is [−R], then it is necessarily [–Art]”—that is, some of the  Among the names of countries that never take an article are Portugal, Honduras, Israel, Cuba, Angola, and Madagascar. 40

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markings in the matrix are redundant. For example, for the word Canadá we have. Canadá [+R, −Q, –Class, −Qual, +Proper, +Art] but it is possible to derive some of these features from more basic ones. In this case, the fact that Canadá is [−Q] entails that it is [–Class] and [−Qual]. And for sufocante ‘oppressive’. sufocante [−R, +Q, –Class, +Qual, –Proper, –Art] the mark [−R] entails [–Proper] (to use traditional language: only nouns can be proper, there are no proper adjectives, verbs, or prepositions). This means that the matrix is in fact simpler than shown earlier— not in the number of classes, perhaps, but in their definitions. Another factor to be considered, also already mentioned, is that there is a hierarchy among the features, so that some of them are in some sense more important for the use of the language. Suppose a foreigner says that o Portugal vai ganhar a copa ‘[the] Portugal will win the cup’, with an article before Portugal; he has of course made a mistake, but it is a minor one, if compared with o sufocante me incomodou ‘the oppressive bothered me’, which is even difficult to understand. This indicates that the feature [Art] is less important than [R], as far as communication is concerned. In this particular case, this is certainly related to the fact that R has a semantic correlate, unlike Art. Here tradition offers a suggestion. We know that traditional grammar puts some emphasis on the difference between nouns (substantives) and adjectives; we have already seen that as traditionally stated this opposition is not valid. But the distinction can be understood as referring to the property of being able to appear as an NP head, which correlates very closely with our semantic feature [+R]. One hypothesis which seems plausible is that this property is particularly important in the description of the language—namely, it may be mentioned in many rules of the grammar; and in fact there is some additional evidence for that claim. First, the verb in a sentence must agree with a constituent having a [+R] head, which inherits this feature, so that the constituent is itself [+R]—that is, a constituent having a [+R] head is an NP also marked as

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[+R].41 Note that it must be [+R], not just [R],42 because of sentences like um elefante azul seria uma sensação ‘a blue elephant would be a success’, where the subject NP is not referential,43 although it might be in another context. This feature is useful because it can be verified independently, that is, for all sentences the constituent with which the verb agrees has referential potential (i.e., has the feature [+R]); this is certainly related with the fact that all NPs are [+R]. Second, only constituents like the ones described earlier—semantically [+R]—can combine freely with a preposition; thus, we can say para meu irmão ‘for my brother’, com meu irmão ‘with my brother’, sem meu irmão ‘without my brother’, de meu irmão ‘from my brother’, any preposition with any NP, provided the sequence makes sense. The comparatively few cases of prepositions with [−R] complements seems to be limited to particular sequences: para breve ‘for soon’, but *de breve ‘from soon’, *a breve, and so on. These observations suggest that the feature [R] is particularly important for the rules of the language, so that the distinction between [+R] and [−R] lexical items should be recognized as one of the basic ones in grammar.

4.5.9 Meaning and Grammatical Behavior A factor that makes word classes easier to use is that there is often a relation between grammatical behavior and the meaning of a word. When we learn a new word, we do not start by observing its grammatical features, but its meaning: barulho ‘noise’ is the name of a thing, corriam ‘(they) ran’ denotes an action, and so on. From that we can infer a lot of information about how the word functions in the sentences of the language. For instance, if it designates a thing then we can use it as an NP head, but not as a clause head, a function which is reserved for verbs. In other cases, the relation between meaning and grammatical function is not totally reliable: nothing in the meaning of a [+R] word tells us  By inheritance; see 15.1.  See the difference explained in note 31 of this chapter. 43  It is attributive, according to Donnellan (1966). 41 42

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whether it is [+Art] or [–Art]; after all, both Portugal and Canadá are names of countries, then why does only Canadá take an article? This must be learned individually, and without any connection to any other feature. There are also many points where the semantics gives no hint about grammatical behavior, and these must be charted one by one in the grammar and in the lexicon. Actually, the relation between meaning and grammatical behavior is complex, and cannot be treated in a few lines; all one can do is provide some suggestions for future research. For instance, take the cognitive category “quality”: it can be expressed by a nominal (a traditional “adjective”, that is, a word marked [+Q]), as shiny; this word is used to assign the quality SHINE to an entity, as in [40] Your necklace is shiny.

But it is also possible to use a verb, as in [41] Your necklace shines.

which says essentially the same. And there are still other factors like the expression of tense/aspect, which in [40] is conveyed by the verb is, in [41] is incorporated into the verb shines; this is one of the choices open to the speaker. A very rich field for the investigation of the relation meaning/grammar is verb valency. I suspect that a general rule (a prototype rule) can be held saying that action verbs which involve an Agent and a Patient tend to appear in subject-verb-object constructions, with the subject as the Agent and the object the Patient. But there are interesting exceptions: in Portuguese, several verbs require a preposition before the Patient complement; and there is at least one verb (apanhar ‘take a beating’) that has the Patient as the subject, and the Agent as a prepositional phrase with de. Yet another factor to be investigated is the comprehensiveness of the subclasses each feature defines. For instance, [R] draws a separation between potentially referential items and nonreferential ones—two large subclasses of lexical items. On the other hand, a feature like [Art], seen earlier, singles out just a small set of proper names that cannot appear with an article, as opposed to all the others, which have it optionally (e.g.,

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personal names). It is natural that we may consider the former type of features as more important, grammatically speaking, for they draw the structure in its broad lines. Another, very important, factor allowing a more economical use of classificatory features is the mechanism of assigning ETRs by default, which will be studied in detail in Chap. 7. To anticipate, in few words: this mechanism allows the assigning of thematic relations to sentence complements by reference, not to the verb’s valency, but to the schema evoked by the verb. If we assume the schema to be previously known, then no linguistic knowledge is involved; for instance, we know that the schema WORSHIP entails the existence of a “worshipped entity”, and this does not depend on grammatical features of the verb, worship: it is part of our world knowledge. This schematic knowledge can then be used in the construction of the cognitive representation, without the intermediation of linguistic rules and features. I must leave it clear that this is a hypothesis, at the present time; but it points to promising directions for future research. A final word about the analyses proposed in the preceding sections: they reflect observation of facts as they look to me at the present moment, taking account of the limitations of the corpus and of my personal judgments. The language has a way to surprise the linguist who attempts to bring it under control; for instance, many words traditionally marked [−Q] may show up in a reference-restricting function, at least in some contexts, as for instance o governo Moraes ‘the Moraes administration’, but never *o carro Moraes ‘Moraes’s car’. The most one can offer now is a set of categories from which eventual deviations can be described; but this, I believe, is already a lot.

4.6 Classifying by Objectives The classification of linguistic units invariably depends on descriptive objectives. Consequently it makes no sense to ask, without qualification, which are the word classes of a language—a question that is asked in all traditional grammars, and in part of current linguistic literature. Classes do exist, but they must be conditioned to a descriptive goal. This is a basic principle of classification; however, it is often ignored in taxonomic

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work. This may come as news to some grammarians, but it has been known in other areas for a long time: Charles Darwin wrote that “all rules for a natural classification are futile until you can clearly explain what you are aiming at”.44 On the other hand, some linguists saw the problem clearly, as for instance Bosque (1989, p. 24), who concludes that “The best answer to the questions requesting a list of units is usually another question: According to which criterion shall this classification be established?” Conditioning classes to objectives may sound a bit strange at first; but some reflection will show that we have little choice in the matter. Take, for instance, verb valency, a basic area of lexicogrammar. To study verb valency is to subclassify the verbs of a language from a particular point of view, but some features are not useful for that: for instance, their morphological distinction in several conjugations, while a very conspicuous mark of all verbs (and only verbs) has nothing to do with their valency class, because the conjugation a verb belongs to has no bearing on the constructions it can occur in. On the other hand, the property of co-­ occurring with a direct object does subclassify the verbs from the valency standpoint: eat can have a direct object, fall cannot. If we change the focus, and want to study the morphology of tenses and moods, then conjugation is relevant, because Portuguese amar (first conjugation) makes the present subjunctive am-e, whereas vender (second conjugation) makes it vend-a; and here the property of occurring with a direct object is irrelevant. This principle pervades grammatical description, so that “class” is not an absolute notion but depends on the descriptive objective of the moment.45 I give some more detailed examples in Sect. 5.3.  Darwin, internet. Letter to George Waterhouse, July 31, 1843.  This restriction is not an exclusive characteristic of grammatical description, but functions for classification in general. To mention a particularly obnoxious example, in a set of questions given as part of a public contest for a job as a janitor, one of the questions was: Which of the alternatives belongs to a DIFFERENT group from the others? A) China     B) Japan   C) Korea   D) France                              [IDECAN 2015] Now, how can someone find the aberrant item, if the basis for the classification is not given? I can imagine several correct answers: (i) France (it is the only European country, all the others being in Asia); (ii) Japan (it is the only insular country, all the others being continental; also, it is the only monarchy in the set); (iii) Korea (it is the only country currently divided into two nations); (iv) 44 45

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4.7 Classifying Words and Lexemes 4.7.1 Words and Lexemes Language is crucially based on two kinds of elements, independent of previous theorization: sound and meaning. This fact has important methodological corollaries. For instance, we cannot start from the notion that casa ‘house’ and casas ‘houses’ are the same word. They are phonologically distinct, and this is sufficient for them to be considered two words, not just one. They can be eventually grouped into a single lexeme, but we should understand that the lexeme is not a primitive unit of the analysis: grouping words into lexemes is the result of a theoretical option. The terminology adopted in this book defines a word as a phonological unit, and contrasts it with the lexeme, which is a grammatical unit composed of words morphologically and semantically related in a systematic way. We thus speak of the words arrive, arrives, arrived, arriving. These words compose what we call “the verb arrive”, which is not a word, but a lexeme. As seen, a lexeme is a class of words, related by inflectional (as opposed to derivational) features. The word word is in very general use, and I hesitated a little before using it in this special acception. But we need terms to characterize this opposition, which is essential in lexicogrammatical description. I hope word/lexeme will be sufficiently clear, once defined, to avoid confusion; introducing new terminology might be worse. Relations inside a lexeme are pretty regular as far as morphological oppositions are concerned: for instance, almost all verbs have forms morphologically parallel to those of chegar: como ‘(I) eat’, comeram ‘(they) ate’, comendo ‘eating’, comer ‘eat’; sou ‘(I) am’, foram ‘(they) were’, sendo ‘being’, ser ‘be’, and so forth. The only exceptions are so-called defective verbs, which lack some of these forms, but these are few, and can be

China (it is much larger than the others, in extension and population). The question itself makes no sense, since the descriptive objective is not explicit. As for the relevance of this information for applicants to a janitorial job, I leave it to the reader’s imagination (this question is translated from a test given by the authorities of São José da Lapa, a town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil).

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enumerated in a grammar.46 Although morphological shape varies, partly according to rules (which define the ‘conjugations’), partly idiosyncratically (as can be seen by comparing regular verbs like chegar, comer with irregular ones like ser), all verbs, except the handful of defective ones, show the same morphological oppositions, so that all have an infinitive, a present subjunctive, all have first and third persons, and so on. Also, the semantic relations are uniform (and here without any exceptions whatsoever): there is no verb that takes the –ndo suffix of chegando, comendo, and sendo with other than gerundive meaning. And all verbs have gerunds, so that if we take ler ‘read’ we already know that there is a gerund lendo that means ‘reading’, and so on for all verbs in the language. A class of words thus connected in a morphological and semantic paradigm is a verb lexeme. English verbs are simpler in their morphology, but the facts are totally parallel: forms like work, works, worked, have been working, and so on, composed of one or more words, belong to the lexeme work, and have parallel in all verbs of the language: sleep, sleeps, slept, have been sleeping, and so on. Although the suffixes themselves may vary, according to verb paradigm (conjugation) and/or irregularity, we can say that for every infinitive there is a present tense, a past perfect, a gerund, and so on. This systematic structure characterizes a lexeme. A lexeme, as said, is connected by inflectional relations; words also enter into derivational relations, which do not show the regularity found in inflection. A word like casa ‘house’ has an augmentative casarão ‘big house’, and a collective casario ‘set of houses’, but not all nouns have augmentatives or collectives, and some that do take different suffixes, following a largely unpredictable pattern: corpo ‘body’ has augmentative corpanzil, and no collective; cachorro ‘dog’ has collective matilha, and so on. This is why we do not call a set like casa, casarão, casario a lexeme: it has no generalizable internal structure, being simply a set of separate lexemes with some similarity in meaning and form (although formal similarity is not always present, as shown by cachorro ‘dog’, matilha ‘pack of dogs’).

 And besides, as pointed out to me by Gabriel Othero, these verbs are frequently used as regular ones, so that the category “defective verb” tends to disappear from the spoken language. 46

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A lexeme is a class of words, and one example is the unit we call “the verb sleep”. But lexemes are also grouped into classes: sleep (and the other forms of the lexeme), work, be, have, sell, and so on can be grouped into a class we call verbs, defined by morphological, semantic, and syntactic features common to all of them. This means that “word classification” must be understood at two levels: the classifications of words into lexemes, and the classification of lexemes into the groupings that receive the traditional designations parts of speech, grammatical categories, and more commonly, although not very accurately, word classes. Here we will be primarily concerned with the second level: word classes is here, then, an informal way to refer to lexeme classes.

4.7.2 What Must be Classified Classification is needed for all units used in linguistic analysis: phonemes, morphemes, words, lexemes, and phrases. We thus have vocalic and consonantal phonemes; prefixes and suffixes; verbs and prepositions; NPs and adverbial phrases. All these classes, and many more, are relevant, at some point and in some way, to linguistic description. We saw that both words and lexemes must be classified, not exactly for the same reasons. It may be surprising that the words composing a lexeme—for instance, the forms of a verb—do not necessarily belong to the same grammatical class. Nevertheless, this has been known for a long time, and is even recognized, although in a characteristically obscure way, in traditional terminology, when forms like the gerund and the infinitive are called “nominal” forms of the verb. The word falam ‘(they) speak’ has always the syntactic function of predicate head, and the same can be said of falavam ‘(they) spoke [indicative]’ and falássemos ‘(we) spoke [subjunctive]’. But falando ‘speaking’ can appear with an auxiliary (estou falando ‘(I) am speaking’), and also in environments where its function is similar to that of adverbs: [42] Ele não consegue dirigir carro falando. (cf. ele não consegue dirigir carro devagar)   ‘he cannot drive a car [while] speaking’ (cf. ‘he cannot drive a car slowly’)

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Finite forms like falam, falavam, falássemos cannot appear in these functions. And, since the class a word belongs to is defined in terms of its functional potential, we must recognize that falando belongs to a different class than falam, falavam, and falássemos, if we require members of a class to have exactly the same functional potential. But this does not mean that a lexeme is an arbitrary grouping of words, or that it only depends on the presence of a common stem. From other points of view the members of a lexeme have features in common, which authorizes us to keep it as a relevant, and important, grammatical entity. For instance, all members of the lexeme falar have the semantic ingredient “speak”, that is, they all express this activity, represented in various ways according to tense, aspect, and person. The formal and semantic relations between the members of the lexeme are systematic: falar ‘speak’ entails the existence of falando ‘speaking’, falamos ‘(we) speak’, and so on just as correr ‘run’ entails correndo ‘running’ and corremos ‘(we) run’, and so on for all verbs in the language. And, more importantly, valencies are defined for all members of a verb lexeme: if falar can co-occur with an object (ela fala alemão ‘she speaks German’), so can falando, falamos, falássemos, and so on. There are no exceptions to this rule. We must then admit that a lexeme is a coherent unit in the language. An impressive example of the difference between a word and a lexeme, and of the different classes a lexeme can include, is given by case forms in languages like Latin and Russian. The dictionary tells us that ‘city’ in Latin is urbs; but this word is lexematically related to its plural urbes, and also to the accusative urbem, genitive urbis, ablative urbe, and so on. These words must be grouped together in a lexeme, which is what the dictionary entry actually refers to. But their grammatical properties are different. Both urbs and urbem are traditionally called “nouns”, but they do not have the same distribution, because urbs occurs as a subject or as a complement of esse ‘be’47: [43] Haec urbs magna est. ‘this city is large’  More precisely, urbs appears as the head of a subject NP, and so on.

47

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[44] Neapolis urbs est.  ‘Naples is a city’.

while urbem occurs in the function of direct object or after certain prepositions: [45] Videmus urbem.  ‘we are seeing the city’ [46] Imus in urbem.  ‘we are going to the city’.

On the other hand, the functional potential of the genitive urbis is similar to that of an adjective: for one thing, both appear as modifiers: urbis portae ‘the gates of the city’, cf. latae portae ‘wide gates’; and urbis, unlike urbs, cannot be the head of a subject NP. It is then essential to distinguish words and lexemes; if we simply say that the lexeme urbs can be subject, object, modifier, and so on, we will conceal an important part of the phenomenon, because this statement refers not to the lexeme urbs, but to the words urbs, urbem, urbis, and so on. Contrast this with the fact, already seen, that valency applies to verb lexemes, not to the individual words that compose them. We must conclude, then, that statements applying to words, as well as statements applying to lexemes, are needed in description. It is also necessary to classify larger and smaller units than words. The smaller units are morphemes, which frequently belong to small classes, very restricted in distribution; this reflects the greater rigidity of word structure as compared with the sentence. For instance, we have the class of person suffixes, appearing in paradigms like.48 fala ‘(he) speaks’   person suffix: -a falam ‘(they) speak’          -m falamos ‘(we) speak’         -mos

 There are some problems specific to morphological units, mainly because suffixes often represent more than one category at the same time—for instance, −o in falo characterizes the first person singular, but also the present indicative. These problems are discussed in works on morphology; for the Portuguese verb, see Camara (1969) and Pontes (1972). 48

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Structures larger than the word are phrases; noun phrase, adverbial phrase, and clause are classes of forms. The noun phrase is the class of forms that can occur in certain functions, like subject, object, and complement of a preposition. Besides, the NP is also characterized by its semantic potential: it can refer to things, whereas a finite verb like falam refers to an event, and a prepositional phrase like de madeira ‘(made) of wood’ denotes a quality. As we see, then, the notion of class pervades the whole grammar.

4.8 The Inductive Way Defining the taxonomic system of a language does not begin by defining classes. Our first step (and it is a long step) is to work on each individual lexical item, and associate to each of them a set of functional properties. We want to deal with relevant properties, but since they are not given in advance, two tasks must be carried on simultaneously: associating each item with its features, and finding out which features to use in this process; in other words, getting and analyzing data and at the same time building the analysis. It sounds like an impossible task, but it can be done, as we have found in our work with verb valency at the VVP Project. The Project aims at classifying the verbs of Brazilian Portuguese according to their valencies—that is, the set of constructions (diatheses) in which each verb can occur. Diathesis is not just another term for construction—a construction is a diathesis when verbs occur in it as a result of lexical conditioning, not freely (as the negative construction, which occurs with all verbs, and is therefore not a diathesis). Each diathesis subclassifies the verbs into those that can appear in it and those that cannot: the ergative construction (C4) is a diathesis of the verbs which occur in it, and subclassifies these verbs in contrast with verbs that do not occur in the ergative. The set of all diathesis of a verb is its valency; and verbs

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are classified according to valency, so we are still dealing with word classes here.49 Diatheses work as distinctive features, formally equivalent to the ones we saw in the preceding sections, and are thus a basis for classification. Occurrence in a diathesis can then be understood in two ways: first, actual occurrence—answering to the question, What diathesis is this verb in, in the present sentence? Here we are dealing with a function, which, as always, can be defined only by reference to a context. And, second, potential occurrence, answering to the question: What diatheses can this verb occur in? and here we are dealing with a class, defined out of context: more specifically, defined by a set of possible functions. Thus, the verb quebrar ‘break’ occurs in two diatheses, exemplified by [47] O menino quebrou o copo. ‘the boy broke the glass’ (C1) [48] O copo quebrou. ‘the glass broke [= was broken]’ (C4).

whereas acariciar ‘caress’ only occurs in the first of these constructions: [49] A menina acariciou a tia. ‘the girl caressed her aunt’ (C1) [50] * A tia acariciou. *‘the aunt caressed [= was caressed]’ (C4).

This difference puts quebrar and acariciar in different classes, since they have different feature matrixes: quebrar has C1 and C4 in its valency, acariciar has only C1. This way we build a dictionary of verb valencies of the language. This is the inductive way to classification. We do not have to start from nothing, to be true. Both traditional and modern linguistics offer a store of insights, classes, and theoretical notions,  Traditional grammar defines a small set of such classes: intransitive, transitive, copulative, and so on. We have found a far more complex picture in our work on Portuguese verbs. 49

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and much of it can be used, if properly controlled. For instance, no one would have the idea of trying the semantic feature [Blue], distinguishing words referring to blue things from nonblue ones: we know enough, from the observation of many languages, to see that this semantic feature has no grammatical import. On the other hand, [Human] is relevant in some languages, and deserves to be tested; the same for [Future], [Plural], which can be used as part of the conditioning of grammatical rules, although some languages do without these features in their structure. This does not mean that these languages cannot express these notions— only that they do not use them as a basis for grammatical rules, relations, and the like. Thus, the difference between the roles Location, Source, and Goal is not grammatically expressed in Nahuatl; yet speakers express them, whenever necessary, by using deictic words (Launey 1992, p. 53). But in Latin these roles are grammatically signaled, by using cases and prepositions: ablative with in (Location); ablative with ab or ex (Source); and accusative with in or ad (Goal). Therefore, these are semantic roles in the grammar of Latin, but not in that of Nahuatl. Examples like these are important, and show that the limits between what Talmy (2000, pp. 178–179) calls macroscopic and fine-structural levels of representation of concepts in language are not universal: languages can differ in the way they draw the line between the two. On the other hand, this does not mean that nothing about this limit is universal—the distinction is present in all languages, but the details must be investigated on the field, so to speak. The results of Wierzbicka’s (1988, 1996) work on primes and universals are likely to be of relevance here. The fact remains that there is too much we do not know about the way words distribute themselves in classes; and, above all, most of the work done to date on word classes has started from the idea that classes are something more or less rigid and well- defined, with some bothersome items at the edges, but with a tolerably neat list of members. In Sect. 4.5 I tried to show that it is not so: a word is associated not with a class per se, but with features that describe portions of its grammatical behavior. And, given our present state of ignorance, it is more prudent to begin by assuming that every word is a class in itself, and analyze each in its own terms. This is a research strategy, not a theoretical claim purporting to describe the way languages function; we may end up with as many classes

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as words (which Gross almost did, cf. the quote in Sect. 4.3.1), but I do not believe it will come down to it. I am sure classes can be defined that are basic to the structure of a language, and deserve to be taken into account in its description. Practically every word is, certainly, unique, as words must be, since they must refer to different things in the world; but most differences are grammatically insignificant. The problem is how to adjust our description so that it captures significant features while leaving out grammatically irrelevant meaning distinctions. For instance, eat accepts a different set of objects than drink: you can eat, not drink, a cookie. But is this difference grammatically relevant? Certainly not in Portuguese and English: the difference has no grammatical effect, and is fully derivable from the features of the schema evoked by each verb. Contrast this with the difference between look and resemble: the former takes a complement introduced by like, as in Alice looks like her mother, the latter takes a direct object: Alice resembles her mother. This difference is not derivable from the meaning of the verbs (which, in these examples, are synonymous), and must be included in the grammatical description of the language. This is a test for relevance: stating the requirement of a preposition in the complement of look is part of this verb’s valency, and must appear in the description of the language. But stating the fact that drink takes an object (more precisely, a Patient) denoting a liquid substance is not grammatical information—it may be considered linguistic information, but having to do exclusively with the meaning of the respective lexical item, the verb drink. Since this meaning must be stated anyhow, we simply derive it from the LIQUID feature of schemas like BEER and the like—cognitive, not linguistic, markers.50 These examples show that we do not have to start from zero when studying the grammatical behavior of lexical items. As is typical in scientific work, we assume some noncontroversial theoretical points (and there are many of those); but the description must be based, when in any doubt, on empirical observation, which can eventually become the basis  Here, and in other points, I may seem to assume a distinction between cognitive and linguistic features; of course, this is not strictly correct, since knowledge of language is part of cognition. I only use this distinction as an abbreviation for “cognitive, but nonlinguistic” as against “cognitive, linguistic”. 50

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for the building of generalizations, hypotheses, and theories. This is not a radically inductivistic view of research in linguistics; it was devised in order to avoid the many pitfalls that arise from premature theorization, which is a disease affecting some recent work in our discipline.

References Bosque, Ignacio. 1989. Las categorías gramaticales: relaciones y diferencias [Grammatical categories: relations and differences]. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis. Camacho, Roberto G., Marize M.  Dall’Aglio-Hattnher, and Sebastião C. Gonçalves. 2014. O substantivo [The noun]. In Palavras de classe fechada. [Closed-class words], ed. Rodolfo Ilari. São Paulo: Contexto. Camara, J. Mattoso, Jr. 1977. Dicionário de linguística e gramática [A dictionary of linguistics and grammar]. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Culicover, Peter W. 1999. Syntactic nuts. Hard cases, syntactic theory, and language acquisition. Oxford University: Press. Donnellan, Keith. 1966. Reference and definite descriptions. Philosophical Review 75: 281–304. Emonds, Joseph. 1985. A unified theory of syntactic categories. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications. Ferris, Connor. 1993. The meaning of syntax. London: Longman. Greenbaum, Sidney. 1969. Studies in English adverbial usage. London: Longmans. Gross, Maurice. 1975. Méthodes en syntaxe [Methods in syntax]. Paris: Hermann. Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge University Press. IDECAN. 2015. Concurso público no 001/2015, Prefeitura Municipal de São José da Lapa/MG. Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Launey, Michel.1992. Introducción a la lengua y a la literatura náhuatl [Introduction to Nahuatl language and literature]. México: UNAM. Lemaréchal, Alain. 1989. Les parties du discours: sémantique et syntaxe [Parts of discourse: Semantics and syntax]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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Martin, John W. 1975. Gênero? [Gender?] Revista brasileira de linguística 1 (2): 3–8. Perini, Mário A. 1999. Sobre o conceito de ‘item léxico’: uma proposta radical [On the notion of ‘lexical item’: A radical proposal], paLavra 5, PUC/RJ, pp. 140–163; reprinted in Albano, Eleonora, et al. 2003. Saudades da língua. Campinas: Mercado de Letras. Perini, Mário A., Regina Bessa, Sigrid T. Fraiha, and Lúcia Fulgêncio. 1996. O Sintagma nominal em português: Estrutura, significado e função. [The NP in Portuguese: Structure, meaning, and function] Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, extra issue, Belo Horizonte: UFMG. Pontes, Eunice. 1972. Estrutura do verbo no português coloquial [Structure of the verb in colloquial Portuguese]; Petrópolis: Vozes. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale [A course in general linguistics]. Paris: Payot. Schlesinger, Izchak M. 1995. Cognitive space and linguistic case: Semantic and syntactic categories in English. Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol I: Concept structuring systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Webster. 1971. Webster’s seventh new collegiate dictionary. Springfield, MA: G. and C. Merriam. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1988. The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 1996. Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford University Press.

5 Classes and the Grammar

5.1 Classes in Grammatical Description 5.1.1 Shared and Idiosyncratic Features We have just seen a conception of word classification that goes against the traditional one—present not only in so-called traditional grammars, but also in much of modern linguistics. Some authors show understanding of the problem: […] it appears that the natural analysis from the perspective of what is actually found in the language is one in which the minor category containing the elements neither, either, both is sui generis. These elements are members of a special category that is not adverb, quantifier, or conjunction, but shares properties of each. (Culicover 1999, p. 56)

I think Culicover grasps the essence of the problem, but he is still conditioned by the traditional position when he refers to “adverbs”, “quantifiers”, and “conjunctions” as if they were previously defined and relatively safe categories. His “special category” is rather typical of the way lexical items are classified in general, and such fixed points of reference as “adverb” and so on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. A. Perini, Function and Class in Linguistic Description, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6_5

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are difficult to define properly. As far as I can see, Culicover’s “special category” is actually the most common situation, in a first moment of the analysis: not special at all. Now, once we have a sufficient amount of analyzed data, prototypical groupings of features may, and I think will, arise and lead to the definition of the main classes. But this depends on discriminating among features for grammatical importance, and the resulting classes are unlikely to be homogeneous: sharing of properties is a pervasive phenomenon in language structure. As a result, the only precise way to refer to lexical items is by using the feature matrix of each; this shows not only their similarities but also the points in which they differ among themselves. One example is the case of como ‘as, like …’, examined in Sect. 4.5.4. We saw there that this word has some of the features of a conjunction, and some of a preposition (if we assume these classes as tolerably well defined). Furthermore, and unlike most other so-called conjunctions and prepositions, como can also appear in interrogative and exclamative contexts,1 as in [1] Como você conseguiu escapar?     ‘how did you manage to escape?’ [2] Como ela está bonita!     ‘how beautiful she looks!’

This shows that we still need features to complete the classification of this word. Now, to take prepositions as examples: para ‘towards’ and de ‘from’ can be followed by an adverb like lá ‘there’, but em ‘in’ cannot: [3] Vou mudar para lá.     ‘I am going to move (to) there’ [4] Eles chegaram de lá.     ‘they arrived from there’ [5] * Ele ficou em lá.     ‘he stayed in there’  In these contexts it translates as English how.

1

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Occurrence before there in English has a different distribution: *to there, from there, in there. Still speaking of prepositions, some of them can appear without a following NP in an anaphoric context: [6] Mamãe foi de casaco, e eu fui sem.     ‘Mom went with a coat, and I went without’ [7] * Mamãe foi sem casaco, e eu fui de.     ‘Mom went without a coat, and I went with’

At the extreme point of idiosyncrasy we have the use of prepositions with divisions of the day: one can say [8] De tarde/à tarde/pela tarde (à = prep. a + article a)    ‘in the afternoon’

but with other divisions the possibilities differ: [9] De dia/*ao dia/*pelo dia (ao = prep. a + article o)    ‘during the day’ [10] De noite/à noite/*pela noite    ‘at night’ [11] De madrugada/*à madrugada/pela madrugada     ‘in the early morning’

We have four divisions of the day, each with its exclusive pattern of use of prepositions.2 These are just a few examples out of a multitude of idiosyncrasies affecting so-called prepositions and conjunctions, which shows that the occurrence of homogeneous classes in this particular area of the grammar is limited. Idiosyncratic behavior alone does not single out an item as special, since most items (in particular grammatical items such as prepositions, conjunctions, etc.) show a mix of shared features and highly individual ones. The situation described by Culicover (1999) is real; and,  As seen in the glosses, English is also complex in this point.

2

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although in the passage cited he seems to believe that the behavior of the items in question is exceptional, in other points of his book he voices a more realistic opinion, for example, […] there is in principle an unbounded set of syntactic categories in natural language. I will concentrate on elements that appear to belong to two or more categories at the same time. In these cases it appears that these elements actually form a distinct category of their own, on the basis of their conceptual structure or formal properties. (Culicover 1999, p. 36)

Culicover observes the phenomenon correctly, but I have restrictions on the way he interprets it: instead of belonging to more than one category, which is a logical impossibility, if we define a class in terms of functional potential (see Sect. 4.2.1), I prefer to speak of groups of items that share one or more properties, thus making up a class in reference to specific grammatical rules or processes. Much of the recent work in linguistics, and all of traditional grammar, admits that classes can be defined in context; this violates the strict separation that must be observed between functions and classes (that is, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, respectively). This position is possibly motivated by the wish to preserve the traditional list of classes; but it leads to inconsistent and indefensible positions. For instance, to return to an earlier example, the word amiga ‘friend; friendly’ is often analyzed as a noun when it appears in a context like [12] Minha amiga vai telefonar.     ‘my friend will call’

and as an adjective, or as a noun “used as an adjective”, in [13] Ele precisa de uma palavra amiga.     ‘he needs a friendly word’

This, for one thing, is arbitrary: why not say, instead, that amiga “is” an adjective, “used as” a noun in [12]? Besides, this analysis fails to distinguish functions (NP head, modifier) from classes (noun, adjective). We end up saying that a word is a noun whenever it is an NP head—which makes the designation “noun” a synonym of “NP head”, and therefore superfluous.

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But classes are needed: only, they should be defined not by actual function in a given context, but by the set of functions that can be occupied, that is, its functional potential: a “noun” could be a word that can be an NP head. But even this solution, while more correct theoretically, does not work in practice, because many words, like amiga, have both features (can be an NP head and a modifier), but other words have only one of them: only NP head (lápis ‘pencil’), and only modifier (pulmonar ‘pulmonary’). If a noun is defined as a word that can be an NP head, there will be no way to describe the difference between amiga and lápis, which nevertheless behave differently in grammar.3 It is necessary to take into consideration sets of functional features, not just isolated ones, in classifying words and other units—and, additionally, to consider the descriptive aim of each grammatical statement, which also conditions the way words are grouped together into classes.

5.1.2 Rebuilding the Grammar The inevitable conclusion is that the word class system of traditional grammar must be fundamentally revised. This of course entails extensive reworking of the whole of grammatical analysis, ranging from the organization of chapters down to the statement of particular rules; here we are paying the price of many years (centuries, even) of insufficient attention to theoretical considerations in the elaboration of grammars. In this book I offer some suggestions on how to start on the long and hard task of reforming our grammatical thinking. Consider the task of building NPs: instead of stating that the NP head must be a noun, it will be necessary to say that it must be a word marked with the syntactic feature [+NP head]; all other syntactic features are irrelevant for this task. Thus, we have NPs like a good book; your own good; you; that stone wall; the large stone and so on. Note that we do not have to decide whether book and stone are nouns or adjectives, nor do we have to state separately that you may be an NP head, and that therefore some pronouns can occupy this function—at this stage in the analysis, it is enough to say that book, good, wall, stone, and you have the feature [+NP head]. In another section of the grammar, we will have to state the words that can be a modifier; examples are a good book, that stone wall, a wall  And, besides, you and everyone will be nouns.

3

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outlet, book store. But you cannot be used as a modifier, and there is no way to use large as an NP head, so that the feature composition of these words (as far as these two features are concerned) will be (Table 5.1)4 In this particular case, we know that these syntactic features are direct correlates of semantic features of these words, so that one can say that a word can be an NP head whenever it has referential potential (which is clearly the case with book, stone, wall, and you, but not with large); and that a word can be a modifier whenever it has reference-restrictive potential, which is true of book, large, stone, and wall, but not of you. That is, the list of words marked [+NPHead, +Mod] is extensionally equivalent to the list of words marked [+R, +Q], and analogously for all occurrences of these features in the lexicon. The items listed earlier have, then, the following analysis in terms of [±R] and [±Q] (Table 5.2).5 I say “extensionally” because the information provided by the two pairs of features differs: the first tells us about the syntactic behavior of each item, the second about their meaning. And if in fact they are extensionally equivalent, then we can dispense with the syntactic features, and include Table 5.1  NP head, modifier (English)

Table 5.2  Features R and Q (English)

Book Good Large Stone Wall You

Book Good Large Stone Wall You

NPHead

Mod

+ + − + + +

+ + + + + −

R

Q

+ + − + + +

+ + + + + −

 English is more liberal than Romance languages in assigning the matrix [+NP head, +Mod] to many items, mainly because of the occurrence of the double-noun construction like stone wall. But there are nevertheless words that have only one of these properties: large and you are examples. 5  The feature [+R] means “has referential potential”, and [+Q] is “has reference-restrictive potential”. 4

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only the semantic ones in the lexicon, adding the grammatical rule that an NP head is always an item marked [+R], regardless of any other features it may have; and all items so marked can be NP heads. In the aforementioned example we see syntactic facts that closely correlate with semantic features, and can be taken care of simply by stating a rule of symbolic correspondence. This does not happen in all cases; we sometimes need purely formal features, as for instance when stating the conditions for gender agreement between nominals in Portuguese: we say um livro ‘a book’ and uma pedra ‘a stone’, and this depends on formal features of the items livro (masculine) and pedra (feminine). Gender cannot be derived from the meaning of these words, but apart from this the features work in the same way. Thus, we know that both livro ‘book’ and pedra ‘stone’ can be NP heads, because of their common feature [+R], although when describing agreement we must take into account different features. When describing the fact that both can be NP heads we disregard their grammatical gender. These grammatical statements refer not to lexical items as such, but to their features. We are not putting words like book, stone, wall, and you in the same bag, calling it a class; we are instead associating each item with a feature matrix, and stating the rules by reference to a subset of the features in the matrix. Analysis by features is highly flexible, and much more convenient for grammatical description than analysis by word classes. It allows us to avoid some of the uncertainties of usual descriptions, and provides a precise way to state the way lexical items pattern in sentences and other units—which would not be possible if we used word classes as traditionally understood. I do not claim to have invented this way of classifying words. The Roman grammarian Varro6 already used features in his analysis of words, and many others followed him in this.7 But I am not aware of systematic attempts to integrate a set of features, and their detailed definitions, into a comprehensive analysis of linguistic forms.8 The use of features like [N], [V], [A], and [P] in generative grammar escapes some of the objections  Apud Jespersen (1924, p. 58). See Varro’s relevant passages (in French) in Baratin and Desbordes (1981, p. 153 ff). 7  Notably Gross (1975), who shows a very clear and adequate view of the classification problem. 8  This in syntax; in phonology, features are very commonly used in the statement of rules. For partial, and very deserving, recent attempts see Gross (1975) and Levin (1993). 6

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raised in this book, but the model is far too simple to account for the complexity of the data, and the features used are too abstract, too gross-­ grained, and without intuitive content, which makes them difficult to test empirically. For example, the generative system cannot express detail features like [Art], which as we saw distinguishes Canadá from Portugal in Portuguese; and detail features like this are numerous in any language. The features are defined at a level which is too far from observable data: classifying a word like black as [+N, +V] strikes me as a roundabout way of saying that it is [+R, +Q], but only the latter analysis refers to concrete properties, directly accessible to introspection. The generative system depends on hypotheses like the one that assimilates adjectives to verbs, but this similarity, if true, must be expressed in more detail, because after all from some relevant points of view adjectives are not verbs. Such a simple system ignores too many grammatical properties, which are not all reducible to conditions of cognitive adequacy. If the present book has a contribution to offer, it is the attempt to develop classification by features in a more systematic, concrete, and empirically adequate way than found in the literature. In traditional practice features are merely a help in defining classes, which keep being conceived of as sets of items to which grammatical rules must refer. Some of these sets probably do exist, but analysis cannot start from them: they must be found by empirical survey based on the working hypothesis that every word is different from all others. Once we have results on a sufficient number of lexical items, we can start looking for those that have identical or similar feature matrixes, and put them into classes; but not before the survey is complete, or at least reasonably advanced. This means that designations like “noun” do not have to be necessarily scrapped—they may be useful in the description, but their definition must be based on the analysis of the functional potential of many words. An example of a class that will certainly be needed is the verb—its functional potential and morphological features are clearly very different from all other words, and it is not possible to write a grammar without reference to verbs as a pretty homogeneous class.

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5.2 Semantic and Morphosyntactic Classes Some linguists tend to view word classes as a by-product of semantics; this is an interesting hypothesis, but it is demonstrably partial, although it is sometimes taken as an absolute truth. Langacker expresses a realistic position: Obviously, […] the membership of many grammatical classes is not fully predictable on the basis of semantic or phonological properties, e.g. the class of nouns that voice f to v in the plural (leaf/leaves, but reef/reefs). (Langacker 1991, p. 19)

Referring to Portuguese, Basilio expresses the same general position when she states that […] there is an obvious general relation between semantic and grammatical properties of word classes. (Basilio 2004, p. 23)

This seems to be the most common opinion: syntax can be predicted from semantics in some measure. But, of course, this calls for details: in which measure, and specifically where and how, does semantics allow prediction of syntactic structure? And, chiefly, how does each language go about establishing this correlation? Taylor, in a text that I find less clear than desirable, seems to support a more radical view, which however is easily falsified; I refer to his statement that syntactic facts can be exhaustively described with some kind of reference to semantics: […] the aim of these Cognitive Grammar studies has not been to ‘reduce’ syntactic phenomena to semantics, in the sense that formal aspects of an expression can be fully predicted from, and are fully determined, by, its semantics. […] The expectation, rather, is that the syntactic (and morphological) facts of a language will be motivated by semantic aspects and that they can be exhaustively described by means of symbolic structures. (Taylor 2002, p. 29, his emphasis)

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What Taylor’s text seems to exclude is the possibility that some morphosyntactic facts can be entirely independent of semantic factors— which, however, is frequently the case. Levin (1993) is more moderate in her position: […] the behavior of a verb, particularly with respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments, is to a large extent determined by its meaning. Thus verb behavior can be used effectively to probe for linguistically relevant pertinent aspects of verb meaning. (Levin 1993, p. 1)

As she does not say “exhaustively”, this can be taken as the expression of a heuristic instrument, whose usefulness may depend on the area of grammar one is investigating: when working on verb valency, we find a very large incidence of discrepancy between semantics and syntax, so that in this area the working hypothesis suggested by Levin is to be taken, with due caution, at most as a useful hint. In other areas the correlation is present—for instance, in Portuguese one finds that agentive modifiers in the NP are necessarily postposed to the head, and there is no exception;9 and it will be seen in Chap. 10 that a necessary and sufficient condition for a word to be able to function as an NP head is for it to have referential potential. Another impressive example is the systematic relation between verb forms and their meanings; thus, the verb form falei ‘I have spoken’ conveys semes like “past”, “perfect”, “1st person singular”; this is true of all verb forms containing the same morphemes, such as andei ‘I have walked’, comi ‘I have eaten”, and fui ‘I have been’. Again, there are no exceptions, as would be a verb in this form with other semantic ingredients. We must conclude, then, that the relation between grammatical behavior and meaning is a complex question to be researched in detail, with basis on the inspection of data, not asserted as an a priori belief. Therefore, speaking of semantic structure as motivating, or even determining, syntax is not explicit enough. What semantic features are we referring to? Some semantic features are irrelevant for grammar—an example is the several differences among action verbs, such as close, break,  For instance, sequences like decisão presidencial ‘presidential decision’, where the modifier is the Agent, and must occur after the head, although the order modifier-head is common in other cases. 9

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open, cook, and so on, which have very similar valencies although they obviously mean different things. Other features do have syntactic correlates, like the ones mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Identifying the semantic features that have grammatical import is essential in description, since it conditions the way we state many rules; and, besides, it represents one aspect of the sound/meaning relation which is basic in language. But it must be kept in mind that it is a complex task, not to be dismissed with blanket statements like “syntactic form is largely determined by meaning”—the crucial question is which aspects of meaning are relevant, and in which way they determine which aspects of formal structure. This is often taken into account in practice, but, I feel, in a somewhat unsystematic way. We need a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon, including integration of its effects on the description— which, by the way, will allow us to simplify syntax as advocated by linguists like Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) and others. What we do know is that there is some degree of interaction between the two spaces, semantic and morphosyntactic, but exactly where and how this occurs is still in part a matter of conjecture. Here, as in so many areas of linguistic description, work on details is urgently needed. Some relevant work has been done on what are usually termed thematic hierarchies, or linking rules, or even better prototype rules: in particular, the relation between semantic roles and syntactic functions. Work on Portuguese valencies has shown the validity of a prototype rule of the form Agentsubject

meaning that the role Agent is prototypically coded as the subject of the sentence. This is of course no novelty, and it has been largely corroborated by our survey; exceptions do occur, but they are few.10 Other rules seem to have no exception, such as the one that stipulates that the Knower (a semantic role occurring with verbs of knowing) is coded as the subject.11 Cases like these exemplify the work that must be done before  The symbol ‘’ is read as “is prototypically realized as”. A survey of 133 diatheses in the Valency dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese verbs shows that the rule Agentsubject works in about 97% of the cases. 11  According to Carvalho’s (2012) results. It may be observed that passive sentences are not taken into account, since they are analyzed as diatheses of the verb ser ‘be’, and the Knower present in such cases is not a verbal complement, but rather a complement of the participle. 10

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we can be precise about the relations between morphosyntactic facts and meaning. In other cases a general relation is lacking; an interesting example, still in the valency area, is the difference between the verbs steal and rob: with steal the stolen thing is the object (the thief stole $500 from Martha), with rob the victim is the object (the thief robbed Martha of $500). Since these verbs are practically synonymous, and lead to the same cognitive representation, they show clearly how meaning does not determine form in every case. Cases like this are frequent, as a perusal of valency dictionaries shows. The most convenient, and prudent, working hypothesis to be adopted is that morphosyntax can be semantically unpredictable; cases where it is predictable are to be discovered one by one—and, I would add, duly quantified. Any more ambitious generalizations are to wait until work is more advanced in this sector.

5.3 Feature Selection by Grammatical Rules Let us now consider another important point in which much of traditional analysis is, I believe, mistaken: the way grammatical rules select the features that are relevant for its application. To start with an example from phonology: there is a rule in Portuguese that voices /s/ before voiced consonants; it applies before /d/ but not before /t/, since only the former is voiced: desde [ˈdezʤɪ] ‘since’, but deste [ˈdesʧɪ] ‘of this’. As seen, from this point of view /t/ and /d/ belong to different classes: /t/ goes with /k/ and /p/, whereas /d/ goes with /g/, /b/, /n/, and so on. Now, there is another rule12 that palatalizes /t/ and /d/ before /i/: dia [ˈʤijə] ‘day’, and tia [ˈʧijə] ‘aunt’. Now /t/ and /d/ are alone in the same class, since they behave identically for purposes of the application of this rule: they are the only consonants that palatalize before /i/.13 Consequently, it makes little sense to ask, “are /t/ and /d/ in the same class, after all?” The reason is that the rules do not take classes in

 This rule works in most of South-Central Brazil; in the North it is often ignored.  Palatalization affects [+obstruent, +coronal, –nasal] consonants, namely /t/ and /d/.

12 13

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consideration at all, but are calibrated in function of features: what causes voicing of a preceding /s/ is not the class /m, n, l, r, b, d, g, v/, but rather the presence of the feature [+voice] in the following consonant. As it were, each rule creates its own classes. This example, and the ones that follow, illustrates the fact that all classification depends on the establishment of descriptive objectives, a principle introduced in Sect. 4.6. Now transfer these considerations to word classes. We know that barulho ‘noise’ can be an NP head: [14] O barulho parou de repente.     ‘the noise stopped suddenly’

The occurrence of the word in this context is the result of the application of rules, which must take into account the fact that barulho is [+R]. The fact that barulho is [–Q], while true, has no relevance at this moment, and the rule does not mention this feature. Now if the task is adding a qualificative to an NP beginning with um motor … ‘an … engine’, it is the feature [–Q] that will be relevant, since it prevents the insertion of barulho ‘noise’ to generate *um motor barulho; here we need a word marked [+Q], and the result can be for instance um motor barulhento ‘a noisy engine’. For the latter rule, the feature [R], marked “+” or “–”, is irrelevant. An item marked [–R] will do as well, provided that it is marked [+Q]: um motor estragado ‘a broken engine’, since estragado ‘broken’ is [+Q]; the fact that it is [–R] has no importance whatsoever for the application of this rule. Here the hierarchy of features according to grammatical importance comes into play. For instance, take the class of words we call “verbs”: they are not all identical, and differ in several respects, for instance according to morphological inflection (1st, 2nd, 3rd conjugations), and to valency (possible complements occurring with each item). On the other hand, all verbs have some important features in common: all can occur as head of a clause;14 and all belong to lexemes including oppositions of person, tense, and mood. These lexemes are all identical not only in their morphological aspect but also in the semantic information their morphological markings convey. This means that the class of verbs must appear in the description, 14

 Or of a verb phrase, in case this function is accepted in the description.

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since otherwise too many grammatical statements will become difficult to express. As for the nominals, we may define them as items having the feature [+R], since this feature plays a role in an important rule of the grammar. As seen, it all depends on the orientation one gives to the description; all details must wait until more comprehensive descriptions are available. This provides a clear view on the nature of so-called classes in grammar. We saw in Sect. 4.5.1 how nominal items can be classified by features (R, Q): grammatical rules select features, and each rule may, in principle, select a different bunch of features as the conditioning factor in its application. There are, I am sure, generalizations, but they will only appear after a sufficient number of rules are examined; what is important to realize (and is not commonly recognized) is that features can bunch differently according to the rule to be described—one aspect of the classification by objectives we saw in Sect. 4.6. By now it should be clear that we are unlikely to find many groups made up of words with exactly the same functional potential. Given this situation, is the notion of class still valid? Naturally, we can conceive of classes as approximate groupings of words having in common most, or perhaps only the most important, features. But the aforementioned examples suggest that we must relativize the notion of grammatical class. Two or more items belong to the same class with relation to a particular rule when all of them undergo that rule: here we are incorporating into the definition the condition that all classification is done according to an objective. It is possible to find sets of items that are subject to a particular group of rules, so that their functional potential according to these rules is similar. One example is the set of verbs of Portuguese that can appear in the transitive (C1), intransitive (C2), and ergative (C4) constructions, as for instance [15] Você cortou minha mão. (C1)     ‘you cut my hand’ [16] Essa faca corta. (C2)    ‘this knife cuts’ [17] Minha mão cortou. (C4)     ‘my hand cut’ [i.e., was cut]

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Cortar ‘cut’ is (from this point of view) similar to many other verbs; there is some evidence that children make use of this similarity when learning new verbs, so that as soon as they learn a new verb, say arranhar ‘scratch’, they will try to use it in all three constructions. This means that verbs like cortar ‘cut’, arranhar ‘scratch’ and many others belong, from this point of view, to the same class. But of course they can differ from other points of view. As far as valency is concerned, cortar and arranhar seem to be identical; but cansar ‘tire’, while occurring in all three diatheses exemplified earlier, respectively [18] Esse trabalho cansou as crianças. (C1)     ‘this work tired the children’ [19] Esse trabalho cansa. (C2)     ‘this work tires (i.e., is tiresome)’ [20] As crianças cansaram. (C4)     ‘the children tired (i.e., became tired)’

nevertheless occurs in at least one additional diathesis, in which cortar and arranhar cannot occur: [21] Essa mulher se cansou de você. (C96)     ‘this woman got tired of you’

We have here three verbs, cortar ‘cut’, arranhar ‘scratch’, and cansar ‘tire’ which behave similarly from the point of view of three diatheses; but cansar differs from the other two from the point of view of the diathesis shown in [21]. I conclude that it makes little sense to ask whether they belong to the same class: if we say they do, and also if we say they do not, we ignore part of the data. The problem is that “belonging to a class” must be complemented with the aim of the analysis at each particular point; and the resulting picture is inevitably more complex than just a list of classes with their respective members. We may add that the set of diatheses C1, C2, C4 occurs in the valencies of many verbs, at least a hundred; whereas the set C1, C2, C4, C96 only appears with a few verbs: the only ones known so far are cansar ‘tire’

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and desanimar ‘discourage’ (but not animar ‘encourage’). Observe how this analysis allows a classification of verbs which is at the same time more fine-grained and more informative than the traditional one. We must admit, then, that classes are not atomic, but have an internal structure represented by bunches of features (grammatical properties). This is the only way to avoid the recurrent problems we encounter in traditional analysis, which typically have to do with the question, “What class does this word belong to?” to which one expects a definite, simple, and discrete answer. No such answer is available, or possible. Word classification is not primarily a matter of putting words into classes, but rather of making explicit the feature composition of words. We may then conceive of classification as the association of each word with a set of features, which together define its functional potential (semantic, morphological, syntactic); the word is stored in the lexicon along with all its features. But the classification is actualized in grammar through the selection of a few of these features according to the current rule, with different selections for different rules. Word classes, in their traditional conception, exist only to the extent that some sets of words have exactly the same features in the lexicon—and research suggests that this is an exceptional, and not very useful, type of relation within a grammar. It will be seen in Chap. 6 that even prototypes, being one aspect of classification, are subject to the constraint that an item or a rule is prototypical or not, according to the descriptive aims of the moment.

5.4 O  pen x Closed Classes; Content and Function Words Classes are usually distinguished into open and closed ones. This dichotomy is thus understood: The open classes have very large numbers of members, while the closed ones are highly restricted in membership; a large grammar could be expected to list all members of the closed classes […] whereas for the open ones we would be referred to the dictionary. (Huddleston 1984, p. 121)

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This may be a practical rule of thumb to tell open from closed classes, but since it presupposes that the classes in question have already been established, it cannot be definitory. The dichotomy seems to have some content, but I suspect that their “open” and “closed” nature is derived from other, more basic, features. It has been observed that items belonging to closed classes tend to function as grammatical tools, and have relatively abstract meaning: compare of, from, by with cat, pleasant, and carry. About this Talmy comments that […] categories of language aspects differ in their accessibility to introspection in isolation. […] One type is the meaning of an individual word. Access tends to be greater for an open-class word than for a closed-­class word, and greater for a concrete meaning than for an abstract one. Thus, one can readily attend to the meaning of the open-class concrete word bucket, less so to the meaning of the open-class abstract word relation, and perhaps still less so to the meaning of the closed class and abstract words not and with. (Talmy 2007, p. XIII)

We all know how difficult it is to state the meaning of a preposition out of context, whereas the meaning of a word like cat is much easier to express. Talmy’s examples suggest that accessibility (and concreteness of meaning) is distributed along a continuum even within nouns (bucket more accessible than relation). This may then be a criterion, although there are some doubts that it will always work in a clear and discrete way. When we go down to grammatical features, other possible criteria arise: first, so-called closed classes tend to have features that are very restricted in lexical occurrence. Thus, take the feature (~S)Cn,15 which we saw in Chap. 4 as distinguishing “conjunctions” from “prepositions”. This feature applies only to connectives, specifically to subordinators and relatives, a little more than 30 items in the whole lexicon; the feature is irrelevant for all other items. Even more restricted is the feature [PDet], which marks items that can appear in the specific position of predeterminer in the NP: it applies positively to just one item in spoken Portuguese  To remind: the property of occurring before a (tensed) clause, the result being something different from a clause—that is, an adverbial or adjective phrase. 15

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(todo),16 all other words in the language being marked negatively for it. Now compare this with the feature [NPhead], which applies to tens of thousands of items,17 or with [C1], which marks all verbs that can appear in the C1 diathesis (defined in Sect. 4.5.5); such verbs are certainly more than a thousand. On the other hand, there are very restricted valential features, like C24, which applies to only one verb in the language.18 What we find here is not precisely a dichotomy of open versus closed classes, but a gradation of grammatical features according to the extent of their application to lexical items, and conversely a gradation of lexical items according to the generality of their features. For instance, why does I belong to a “closed” class? It has an important feature in common with “nouns”, namely [+R]; but it also has a few grammatical features of its own, like requiring the form am of the verb be, and being obligatorily deictic; it must then be considered exceptional, in other words a member of a closed class. The dichotomy open versus closed class indeed corresponds, at least approximately, to a gradation of concreteness of meaning (although not for I). It also corresponds to another often mentioned characteristic, namely that the set of members in some classes (the “closed” ones) is stable, being the same for all speakers; and (now speaking diachronically) they tend to stay fixed along time, with very small occurrence of borrowing and loss of items. As for the latter characteristic, it is limited up to a point by grammaticalization, but even this never occurs in massive amounts, unlike what has been observed in recent times with the borrowing of English terms of informatics in most languages—which is almost exclusively composed of nominals and verbs. Open versus closed classes, then, far from being a simple dichotomy, is a much more complex trait of languages, and I would say more interesting than usually realized. It can, and probably must, be expressed in terms of features, as suggested in the preceding paragraphs.

 In the written language it applies to one additional item (ambos ‘both’). In English the set of possible PDets is slightly larger, including items like what (what a movie!) and such (such an idiot). 17  All items called “nouns” in the dictionary, plus most “adjectives”, and several “pronouns”. Aurélio (1986) has about 100,000 such items. 18  Examples: C1: Ivan assou um bolo ‘Ivan baked a cake’; C24: o armário cheirava a mofo ‘the wardrobe smelled of mold’. 16

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References Aurélio. 1986. Ferreira, A. B. H., Novo dicionário Aurélio. Rio: Ed. Nova Fronteira. Baratin, Marc and Françoise Desbordes. 1981. L’analyse linguistique dans l’antiquité classique [Linguistic analysis in classical antiquity]. Paris: Klincksieck. Basilio, Margarida. 2004. Formação e classes de palavras no português do Brasil [Formation and word classes in Brazilian Portuguese]. S. Paulo: Contexto. Carvalho, Janayna M.R. 2012. Valência dos verbos de conhecimento do português brasileiro [Valency of verbs of knowledge in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: M.A. dissertation, UFMG. Culicover, Peter W. 1999. Syntactic nuts. Hard cases, syntactic theory, and language acquisition. Oxford University Press. Culicover, Peter W., and Ray S.  Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford University Press. Gross, Maurice. 1975. Méthodes en syntaxe [Methods in syntax]. Paris: Hermann. Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge University Press. Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations—A preliminary investigation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2007. Foreword. In Methods in cognitive linguistics, ed. M.  González-Márquez, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J. Spivey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taylor, John. 2002. Cognitive grammar. Oxford University Press.

6 Prototypes

6.1 Continuous and Discrete Classes As often happens with very popular notions, prototypes are understood in more than one way. A usual definition refers to continua, limited by zones filled in by “a penumbra of not-so-typical examples” (Taylor 2002, p. 177). It would then be a question of degree: an object belongs to a category to a certain degree, and the prototype would be one that belongs to that category to a particularly high degree. This applies to many aspects of cognition, as has been shown in experiments, mainly because our cognitive system must include some flexibility in order to account for the task of categorizing and interpreting a world full of novel objects that we perceive at every moment. The continuum then reflects reality in many cases, but it also raises a serious methodological problem, how to identify and distinguish these degrees of prototypicity: how can we tell an item that is 40% a member of a category from another that is 50% a member of the same category? Here all we have is intuitive judgments, and the result is that sometimes the use of prototypes does not go beyond anecdotal observation, very difficult to

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incorporate into rigorous analyses. Yet some authors argue for this kind of prototypes for grammatical categories, and here I must disagree. There is an important difference between grammatical prototypes and the ones researched by, among many others, Berlin and Kay (1969), Labov (1973), Rosch (1973, 1975, 1978), and Kempton (1981). In these cases the tested knowledge has to do with classification and naming of concrete objects (birds, containers, colors, and pieces of furniture), which can be done by any person in terms of world knowledge. It is something one can check simply by asking subjects, and this is what is usually done. But when we try to apply prototypes to grammatical categories, we deal with abstract, hypothetic entities of which only linguists have adequate knowledge. Talmy (2007) seems to believe that speakers have some access to classes: […] the lexical category of a word—noun, verb, adjective, etc.—also seems moderately accessible to introspection. Our cognition seems structured to allow us some sense of lexical category, although individuals surely vary on this, and even the most natively gifted individual would need training or practice to be able to articulate this sense. (Talmy 2007, p. XV)

This only applies to people with some grammatical training. Speakers know how to use I, see, the, and bird in a sentence, and can insert them correctly in their respective places; but this does not mean that they can answer a question like, “What class does the word bird belong to?”, except by reference to grammatical training, which reflects not real perception of the language, but a particular linguistic theory learned in school. The situation is radically different from the one in which a person is asked “Is this a cup or a bowl?”, which is an easy question for anyone to understand. We may be testing very different abilities and knowledge in each case; the two situations are certainly not identical, and while we can say that there is an “intuitive” notion of a bird, nothing of the sort can be said about the notions of noun or direct object. As for the character of cognitive notions, even if some of them are continuous, this does not necessarily apply to all of them. For example, there is a continuum between tall and short persons; but there is a discrete distinction between nationals and foreigners, living and dead, bird

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and fish, without intermediary stages.1 That is, world knowledge involves both continuous and discrete notions. The examples used in the studies above have to do with the connection between words and their referents in the real world, and this is an area where continua are inevitable; but even here, as seen, there are cases of discrete distinctions. In any case, these semantic differences between lexical items are irrelevant for the purposes of grammatical description: in grammar what counts is not the difference between a cup and a mug, or the actual use of each of these objects, but the opposition between the words cup and mug.2 When we consider grammatical phenomena, distinctions may be discrete, and in some parts of the grammar they undoubtedly are; thus, intermediate sounds between [s] and [ʃ] may occur when someone speaks English, but this does not mean that there is no discrete boundary between the phonemes /s/ and /ʃ/. A phonetic form like [ʂow] (with the Castilian apical s) may be perceived by an English speaker as so or show, not as an intermediate form, which is not possible in the language. Analogously, we do not have to find a continuous gradation between the several word classes. Apparent cases of gradation, such as “degrees of nouniness”, are actually an artifact of the excessive simplicity of the system we take as a starting point. As long as we only have two categories (say “noun” and “adjective”) to describe a set of items, we may find a large number of intermediate cases, which can give the impression of a continuum. But with a more complex system of analysis we may find that the interval is in fact filled in by items that can be precisely described, without the need for a fuzzy area. This position goes against the one adopted by some linguists who, based on the results of Rosch, Berlin and Kay, and others, have extended the notion of prototypes as continua not only to the referential range of lexical items (where it is often adequate), but also to the definition of formal and semantic units and relations that make up the grammar. The idea is that  I refer to the everyday use of these notions; technically the situation may be different.  Langacker’s arguments (1987, p. 14 ff) against the use of categorical definitions are not convincing—in part precisely because they do not distinguish what is linguistically relevant from what is simply present in the signal. 1 2

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speakers of natural languages form categorizations of linguistic objects in the same way that they form categorizations of natural and cultural objects. (Bybee and Moder, 1983, p. 267)

A priori, this may or not be true; there is no way to decide beforehand. But there is ample evidence that, contrary to Bybee and Moder’s statement, linguistic objects—I refer in particular to lexical items, classes, and grammatical rules—are categorizable in discrete ways. One may be uncertain whether an object is a cup or a mug; but there is no doubt about the grammatical category of these words: they are nouns, or more precisely they have certain functional features that differentiate them from that, with, write, and together. Differences, even when categorical, are not simple, and this contributes to give the impression of a continuum. We saw in Sect. 4.5 that the traditional classes like “noun” and “adjective” are but a rough approximation, only partially describing the grammatical properties of the words involved. Recognizing complexity allows a precise analysis of intermediate cases that appear to occur between the most prototypical ones. The best working hypothesis is to suppose that grammatical categories (classes, rules, formal, and semantic features) are discrete. We then look for categorical solutions, without assuming that they must exist in all cases. This search, so far as it has been carried on, strongly suggests that categorical distinctions are frequent in language: in the area already investigated, including morphology and phonology, there seems to be no room for continua. Instead, evidence points to a system where classification is based on bunches of features, as seen in previous chapters. Fuzziness, which is frequent, refers to the elaboration of linguistic units, rules, and functions, not to the latter themselves. Thus, ETRs like “eater”, “reader”, “kicker”, and so on, are all treated by the grammar together, as one semantic role, Agent. In order to see the extremes to which fine distinctions are taken in elaboration, consider eat an orange, versus eat porridge and eat lunch, which refer to clearly different actions in real life; yet the verb is the same, and so are the semantic roles involved. This position may be summarized by saying that continua may exist, but even so we need to reduce them to discrete categories in the interest of linguistic analysis. This is what most linguists, including those who believe in

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continuous categories, end up doing, if at times not explicitly. I do not know of any examples where an analysis by continua is necessary in grammar. Let us briefly examine a well-known example, found in Ross (1972). Ross begins by stating his belief in continuous (or “quasi-continuous”) categories: I will postulate, instead of a fixed, discrete inventory of syntactic categories, a quasi-continuum […]. (Ross 1972, p. 316)

Ross is right in rejecting traditional categories such as “noun”, “adjective”, and so on; I have objections, though, to the alternative analysis he proposes—in particular, to his notion of (quasi-)continua as a way to represent the phenomena observed. As a matter of fact, however, Ross’s analysis has less to do with real continua than with properties, or features, not too different from the ones I have been using here. It seems to me that, regardless of previous theoretical commitments, as soon as one takes definite steps toward an analysis of the data one finds that real continua are not being used: the analysis ends up meaning, not “this word is more of a noun than that one”, but “this word has more features of a noun than that one”, which takes the question over to a different field altogether. What one is discovering, after all, is not the presence of continua, but the much greater complexity of the facts. In his paper, Ross examines the distribution of prepositions after verbs and after adjectives, and proceeds: […] let us examine the phenomenon of Preposition Deletion.      (3) Preposition Deletion (unfronted).     a. Your odor surprised (*to) me/was surprising *(to) me.      […]     c. I blamed (*on) Harry for the fight/blamed (*for) the fight on Harry. The example in (3a) is typical: for hundreds of related verb/adjective pairs, one finds that some preposition must follow the adjective but cannot follow the verb. Not all verbs require the preposition to delete: the verb talk

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keeps both prepositions, no matter which order its objects appear in […], but the verb blame deletes both for and on, whichever of these ends up immediately after the verb. (Ross 1972, p. 317; his numbering)

As a starting point, Ross selects the property of occurrence, or not, of a preposition with the verb. This is not only a feature: it is binary in principle. Ross goes on to analyze the possibility of left-dislocation by attraction (so-called pied piping) with some adjectives and prepositions (proud, opposite, near, like, in): Another property of these five words which leads me to believe that they form a subsquish is their behavior when pied piping to follow the preposed degree adverbial how […] (7) How X   a. How proud of you is Mr. Greenjeans?   b. ?How nearly opposite from the Coop is the First Gremlin?   c. How near to the toothpaste are the termites?   d. ?How like your mother is your sister?   e. ??How nearly in the house was the yacht? It appears that the more adjectival a word is, the more easily it can pied pipe. (Ross 1972, p. 318; his numbering)

A relevant question would be: “What, exactly, does ‘more adjectival’ mean?” But, leaving that aside, we see that Ross deals with degrees of acceptability. Now, this is an omnipresent factor whenever one works with speakers’ judgments. When acceptability varies, it must be approached through testing with many speakers and/or corpus survey. In these cases we are not dealing with language structure alone, but rather with the effect of a range of factors, not all of them linguistic. That is, the fact that acceptability as observed in practice allows for degrees does not entail that linguistic categories and relations must also be a matter of degree, that is, continua. We can only say, at most, that a (discrete) opposition is variably

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perceived by speakers, some of whom are less sure of their own judgments. But the matter of these judgments are discrete oppositions. Ross has no doubt discovered important phenomena; but I do not agree with his interpretation. The distinction between, say, nouns and adjectives is describable in terms of steps, not as points in a continuum. I conclude that we can work with discrete oppositions as a basis for the construction of a convenient description. Such discrete oppositions can be quantified by using the extension of each phenomenon in the lexicon, in the spirit of the proposals of Maurice Gross who, referring to generative studies up to the 1970s, remarks that […] linguists seem to have given up on building inventories. We believe nevertheless that they are fundamental. Transformational studies only consider small numbers of examples. They have discovered a great number of new phenomena, but they do not allow evaluation of the extension of these phenomena in a given language. (Gross 1975, p. 20) In general, grammarians, after putting in evidence the existence of [some properties], limit themselves to giving some examples of the corresponding class. A survey of the literature shows that syntactic classes are always defined in intention; there is no example of extensional definition, that is, having the form The elements of the class defined by the properties P are m1, m2 … mk (i.e., the list of elements), and there are no others. Our tables […] show that it is possible to construct extensional syntactic classes. (Gross 1975, p. 214)

This applies to the relative importance, or prototypicity, of verbal diatheses (i.e., constructions in which each verb occurs). Some occur in the valency of many verbs, others occur in the valency of just a few, and even a single, verb. Here we can speak of prototypes as a neat, well-defined, and quantifiable notion.

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6.2 Prototypes 6.2.1 Prototypes Define Classes Prototypes are necessary in order to fully account for grammatical phenomena. The need for prototypes is mainly supported by the observation that there are clear statistical tendencies in language. Prototypes are at the basis of such an important feature of grammars as the opposition between regular cases and exceptions. A prototype may be defined in relation to a lexical item but also in relation to a rule. Examples are many, and pretty varied. For instance: a verb is prototypically regular. Statistically, most verbs are regular, and speakers are in some way aware of this. A child learning English will use a verb like bring as if it were regular (Mom bringed the ice cream). And there is a definite diachronic tendency to make irregular verbs regular: in Portuguese the future subjunctive is identical to the infinitive in regular verbs, but certain irregular verbs have different forms for these tenses. There is a tendency to make these tenses identical for many irregular verbs, thus making them more regular. In the spoken language one often finds forms like se você pôr (instead of puser; the infinitive is also pôr) ‘if you put’.3 Note that we can describe these facts completely without recourse to vague notions such as “continuum”, or “a penumbra of not-­ so-­typical examples” (Taylor 2002, p. 177); they can be described in a precise way, and quantified if necessary. What we have here is the effect of prototypical forms, creating a pressure to get rid of nonprototypical ones. Another clear example, now referring to a prototypical rule, is the tendency for Agents to be coded as subjects. This occurs in Portuguese with a large majority of all constructions; we may call this kind of rule a ­prototype rule.4 Here again, children tend to code Agents as subjects

 This is specially frequent in derived verbs: compuser (future subjunctive of compor ‘compose’) sounds almost archaic, so that even schooled people will say se eu compor uma canção pra você ‘if I compose a song for you’, instead of se eu compuser …. 4  Linking rule in Perini (2015); currently I prefer prototype rule, which is more transparent. 3

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even in the comparatively few cases where the rule does not apply.5 One can also say that Patients tend to be coded as (direct) objects in Portuguese; but this is a much weaker tendency. The relative strength of tendencies need not be evaluated by intuition: we can simply go to the Valency dictionary and count all the examples of Patient and the way each of them is syntactically coded. I have no figures at hand, but I can say that many verbs allow the Patient to appear as a subject, as in o vidro quebrou ‘the glass broke’. As seen, there is no difficulty in establishing the relative “degree” of prototypicity of two rules in a precise way. Also, it becomes possible to avoid the methodological problem of researching continua: a continuum, in order to be studied in detail, must be quantified. Thus, we can study relative heights of persons or buildings because we have a metric system that allows a precise placing of each example in the continuum. But how are we to measure the degree of adjectiveness of words? How to escape impressionistic judgments? If, instead, we use features that describe details of the grammatical behavior of these words, we can reduce most of the continuum (if any) to observable and describable dimensions. The notion “extension of a grammatical phenomenon”, which is absent in much of linguistics, is important for the explanation of knowledge and use of a language.6 And this same notion of extension of a grammatical phenomenon can yield a more useful definition of prototype—avowedly, a definition inspired by, and conceivably only valid for, the classification of verbs according to their valencies. Under this qualification, and as a purely preliminary approach, let us understand a prototype as a rule or a set of features associated with a high proportion of verbs or constructions in the language. This definition can be further generalized, of course, in order to cover other phenomena; for the moment, let us be content with it, for it is the one we have data to support. We can now determine some prototypes in Portuguese; first of all, our old friend the rule Agentsubject, that is, the linking rule stating that

 I give an example, taken from real life, in Perini (2015, section 4.3.2).  One great merit of Gross’s work is to have called attention to this aspect of linguistic analysis.

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the prototypical way to code an Agent is the subject. This applies, as we saw, to a very large majority of constructions in the language.7 Another kind of relation that can be prototypical is entailment of existence—when applied to diatheses, it takes for instance the form If a verb has C4 in its valency, it also has C1.

where C4 is the ergative construction, C4 VSubj>Patient  V

and C1 is the transitive construction, C1 VSubj>Agent   V  NP>Patient

For instance, esquentar ‘heat’ occurs in both: [1] O leite esquentou. (C4)    ‘the milk heated’ [2] Eu esquentei o leite. (C1)     ‘I heated the milk’

This entailment rule, because of the way it is stated, must be evaluated by its incidence on the set of lexical items, not over constructions; and a preliminary survey shows that it works for most cases. A survey in the Valency dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese verbs, including 66 verbs that have C4 in their valencies, showed that 56 (84.8%) of them also have C1.8 It is interesting to note that there is a tendency in the modern spoken language to increase the number of verbs included in this prototype; recent examples include the verbs desabar ‘collapse’, crescer ‘grow’, and repercutir ‘to have a repercussion’, which traditionally occur only in C4, but were found in C1 in recent texts in the daily press.9 In other cases, verbs exist in suppletive pairs, as morrer ‘die’ and cair ‘fall’, which only occur in C4, and semantically correspond to matar ‘kill’ and derrubar  About 97% of all constructions, according to a survey of 133 constructions occurring in the valencies of about 500 verbs. The percentage refers only to constructions that have Agent as one of its roles. 8  Survey of letters A–D in the current version of the Dictionary (September, 2020). 9  Examples: Temporal desaba casa ‘storm collapses house’ [headline, Estado de Minas, 2014]; Cresça seu negócio com Youtube ‘grow your business with Youtube’ [internet, March, 31, 2017]. As for repercutir, it has become usual as a transitive in the past few years on radio and TV (Vamos repercutir essa notícia ‘we are going to give this news some repercussion’). 7

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‘fell’, respectively, which only occur in C1; members of such pairs show no tendency to acquire [C4] or [C1], as the case may be.

6.2.2 More Examples Let us now see a short list of possible prototype rules that may deserve some research: (a) A subject is prototypically an Agent (the reverse of Agentsubject, but apparently less reliable). (b) In the presence of a subject Agent, a Patient, if present, is prototypically the object (that is, a nonsubject NP). (c) A verb of action (more precisely: a verb in an active reading) has prototypically C1 and C2  in its valency—where C2 is a construction with a subject Agent and a verb, and no object. There are several rules having to do with the prototypical semantic roles of prepositions. For instance, (d) the preposition com ‘with’ prototypically marks Company, Instrument, or Manner. Constituents introduced by com with roles other than the three listed earlier must be taken care of in diatheses, as in [3] Eu conto com você.     ‘I count on you’

In this case com NP has the role Stimulus (the cause of an experience); this is stated in the valency of the verb, contar ‘count (on)’, and valential marks override prototypical interpretation.10 In cases like [3] it is difficult to attribute the semantic role to the preposition, since there are few parallel examples of com introducing Stimulus. I find it more adequate to  There is empirical evidence that idiosyncratic valential relations do in fact override prototypical ones: I presented some examples in Perini (2015, section 5.2.1). 10

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attribute the role to the valency of the verb, here contar ‘count (on)’, the preposition being a semantically empty requirement. With com there are three prototypical roles in competition, but in general only one of each is actualized in a particular sentence, and ambiguity is avoided as a result of pragmatic factors. For instance, in [4] Vou para o Rio com minha irmã.     ‘I am going to Rio with my sister’

the constituent com minha irmã ‘with my sister’ can, according to rule (d), denote Company, Instrument, or Manner. But only Company results in a well-formed cognitive representation, since a person cannot be the Instrument of a trip, nor can she be the Manner of the trip. Consequently, two of the three assignments are filtered out—by cognitive, not linguistic, reasons—and the sentence is not ambiguous. Compare [4] with [5] Vou para o Rio com meu carro novo.     ‘I am going to Rio with my new car’ [6] Vou para o Rio com muita pressa.     ‘I am going to Rio in a hurry [lit.: with a lot of haste]’

These sentences are not ambiguous, for analogous reasons. In some (comparatively rare) cases the ambiguity may show, because more than one assignment makes sense; this is the case with [7] Joaquim viajou com quatro cachorros.     ‘Joaquim traveled with four dogs’

Here one can understand that the dogs are Company in his trip, or the Instrument (if they are imaged in an Arctic context, pulling a sledge). Such cases are rare, mainly because the three roles conveyed by com describe very different thematic relations, and apply to distinct situations. Returning to our main theme: prototypes provide a more sophisticated device to classify words; with them we have a means to express more precisely the vague notion “degree of belonging”, as when we say that a word is “more” of a noun than another. This device does not apply to classes as traditionally conceived, which as we know are too simple a device to account for the facts; but it allows

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us to make statements such as that verbs that occur in C4 also occur in C1. That is, the property “occur in C1” defines a class of verbs, and “occur in C4 and C1” defines a subclass of that class, made up of 84.8% of the verbs that can occur in C1. Or we can say that mesa ‘table’ is a more prototypical “noun” (that is, a referential word) than amigo ‘friend(ly)’, since the former only occurs with referential meaning, and syntactically as the head of an NP, whereas the latter has also the function of restricting reference of other words, as in um gesto amigo ‘a friendly gesture’. An even less prototypical “noun” is baixinho, which when referential means ‘a short person’, when reference-restricting means ‘short’, and when modifying a verb (a function which mesa and amigo do not have) means ‘softly (said of sound)’, as in ela chorava baixinho ‘she wept softly’. This is classification, expressed in a rather more complex way, which nonetheless has the important advantage of being clearly defined and quantifiable— besides coming closer to describing the observed facts in their wealth of details. Prototypicity, like all aspects of classification, is also contingent on descriptive aims; when we say that cheirar ‘smell’ is a regular, that is, prototypical, verb, because it shares features with several hundred other verbs in the language, we must, to be precise, specify the point of view we are taking, descriptively. Thus, cheirar is prototypical in what concerns the morphological structure of its lexeme, since it follows a conjugation model valid for most verbs with infinitive in—ar, from amar ‘love’ to zurrar ‘bray’. But if we take its valency, it is far from prototypical, because it may occur in a diathesis where only two verbs appear: [8] O armário cheirava a mofo.     ‘the wardrobe smelled of mold’

This construction is analyzed in the Valency dictionary as C24 VSubj>Stimulus V    a NP>Manner

and only cheirar ‘smell’ and feder ‘stink’ can appear in it. This only means, of course, that prototypicity is one aspect of classification, which in its turn depends on descriptive objectives.

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6.3 Prototypes and Verb Valency Verb valencies are one means of classifying verbs: a verb like write has a different valency from be or die, because each of these verbs occurs in a different set of diatheses. This is recognized in traditional grammar with subclasses such as “transitive”, “intransitive”, “ditransitive”, and so on. Here again, the traditional notion of class is too simple, and we must have recourse to properties, that is, distinctive features. Let us consider the three verbs mentioned, write, be, and die. Write occurs in a diathesis with subject Agent and object Patient, as in [9] My aunt wrote several books. (C1)

Neither be nor die can occur in this diathesis. Be occurs with a subject and an object,11 but no Agent or Patient: [10] My aunt is the department head. (C6)

Here the semantic roles are different: one approximation is that both subject and object are members of an equation, so that [10] means “my aunt = the department head”. As for die, it has no object, and the subject is Patient, namely the entity that undergoes a change of state. Like write, break can appear in the diathesis instanced in [9], with subject Agent and object Patient: [11] The children broke the windowpane. (C1)

But break and write are not identical, because break can appear with subject Patient and no object, as in [12] The windowpane broke. (C4)  An “object” is here defined simply as a nonsubject NP (see discussion in Perini 2015, chapter 2; 2019, section 5.2). 11

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and write cannot appear in this diathesis, because if we omit the object (Patient) the subject must still be Agent: [13] My aunt writes. (C2)

We have here a familiar situation, which becomes much more complex as we increase the number of verbs analyzed. Since the number of diatheses in the language is high (more than 300 so far in the Valency Dictionary), and since they distribute among verbs irregularly, there is no hope of defining a small number of subclasses. On the other hand, there are definite tendencies, and these can be analyzed as prototypical. Suppose we find that a large number of verbs have a specific set of diatheses in their valencies—say, C4 and C1, as we saw in examples [1] and [2], with the verb esquentar ‘heat’, and also with English break in [11] and [12]. We can then say that the valency that includes C4 and C1 is prototypical (to an ascertainable and quantifiable degree). To summarize, we see that prototypes are an important aspect of classification. As soon as we classify by features, instead of insisting on classes as separate, nonoverlapping sets of items, we are faced with a rather complex, but far more realistic picture, which nonetheless lets itself be analyzed partially in terms of prototypical tendencies. Available evidence points toward this solution, which I consider the most adequate as an approach to word classification. As an added bonus, this frees us from the difficult situation of having to deal with continua. We saw earlier that the use of continua sometimes found in the literature is more an intention than a fact when it comes to analyze real data. A recent example is Næss (2007), who speaks of transitivity (i.e., valency) prototypes in the following terms: English hit […] takes a ‘direct’, bare-NP object, look takes a prepositional object, and sleep takes no object. […] Such data suggest that “transitivity” may be a matter of degree; examples [like he thinks of the boy] appear to be “more transitive” than the clauses without any O[bject] NP, but “less transitive” than those which treat this O[bject] NP as a privileged syntactic argument. In other words, membership of the category “transitive verb” or “transitive clause” is gradable depending on an item’s degree of similarity to a central exemplar—a prototype structure. (Næss 2007, p.  14; my brackets/MAP)

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As we see, Næss talks of “degree of similarity”, but she expresses this gradability by using discrete elements, that is, the presence of an object, and its bare-NP or prepositional phrase nature. This kind of analysis can be reduced to discrete properties and prototypes.

6.4 Prototypes in the Lexicon and in the Grammar The prototypical nature of rules and relations can be evaluated according to two main criteria. First, we may define it over the total number of constructions in the language; or, alternatively, we can define in relation to the percentage of lexical items (e.g., verbs) that undergo a particular prototypical rule. The results may, or not, be significantly different. Thus, the Agentsubject rule works, as seen, for about 97% of all constructions. But this includes lexically minor constructions, so that, when counted over the lexicon, its importance may be reduced; or, conversely, some relation may be found in very few constructions, but if these cover a large proportion of the verbs in the language it will still be important. The two kinds of definition, then, while both potentially important, must be kept apart. Only a comprehensive survey will reveal the details of the situation: in particular, whether both kinds of prototypes are equally important for description, or not. We can state the relative prototypical importance of any two rules with precision; in other words, we do not have to deal with vague notions such as “a high proportion of verbs” and the like. Instead, we can state clearly how prototypical a rule or an item is, and compare two of them in terms of their relative prototypicity. I try to express this double face of the prototype notion in my provisional definition, that is, a prototype is “a rule or a set of features associated with a high proportion of verbs or constructions in the language”. In any case, rules like Agentsubject automatically define prototypes. In this case the prototype is unique, but there are rules that define more than one prototype in the same lexical domain, to be understood as competing in the grammar: this happens with the three prototypical thematic values of the preposition com ‘with’ which we saw in Sect. 6.2.2. We must be

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prepared to find both kinds of prototypes, which show one aspect of the extreme complexity of word classification, and underline the inadequacy of the traditional system. It remains to be seen if both these kinds of prototypes are equally important in the grammar. I personally tend to think that prototypes should be defined primarily by their lexical extension because of the possibility that a very exceptional diathesis appear in the valencies of many verbs. For the moment, we must postpone a decision until more research is done on the topic.

6.5 Toward a Better Notion of Prototype 6.5.1 Using Features to Define Prototypes Prototypes can then be defined in a more objective way than generally found in the literature. They should be defined in terms of descriptive aims, and can be quantified—for instance, as we saw, the Agentsubject rule applies to most constructions involving an Agent, whereas the inverse rule, subjectAgent, is less prototypical, and applies to a smaller percentage. Also, from the morphological standpoint, the verb dar ‘give’ is nonprototypical, since it is the only one that inflects in its particular way, whereas sorrir ‘smile’ has one inflectionally identical verb (rir ‘laugh’); and pular ‘jump’ is prototypical for its conjugation, being morphologically identical to amar ‘love’, cantar ‘sing’, falar ‘speak’ and hundreds of others. This definition allows a very precise subclassification, making the notion of prototype a useful tool of analysis. At the same time, it allows a good definition of exception—an exception is simply a nonprototypical form or rule. We can refer to them in a precise way, since it is one thing for an exception to be really unique in the language, and another to belong to a small class of exceptional items, as for instance in English verbs like sing, which is parallel to several others, without being really regular (prototypical). It cannot be said that this covers all cases of prototypicity found in the literature; but it covers a significant percentage of them, and is a useful notion in analysis.

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It can also help solve some embarrassing situations, in which one wants to define a regularity, but it must be partial because of a small set of exceptions. For instance, an NP is prototypically referential, and cannot (again, prototypically) denote a Location: the East Coast is a thing, not a Location (on the East Coast is a Location); we can say New York is on the East Coast, but not New York is the East Coast (if we mean the same as the first sentence). Nevertheless, the East Coast can denote a Location—independently of the presence of a preposition—with a few verbs, as in [14] The Algonkians inhabited the East Coast.

Since this happens with only a few verbs (inhabit, occupy, roam), we can go on and assert the prototypicity of the rule that prevents an NP from denoting a Location, with the restriction that it is highly, but not totally, effective. The search for prototypes must be complemented by an effort to quantify them in order to properly evaluate their importance in the structure. We are then freed from vague qualifications like “central” and “marginal”, or even “more central” and “more marginal”, which can be avoided because classification by features is discrete, and makes it possible to state the position of an item in a class in precise terms. This conception of prototype depends on classification by features: returning to irregular verbs, they can be subclassified according to the number of irregular forms they include: perder ‘lose’ is irregular only in the indicative present (first person), and present subjunctive, whereas dar ‘give’ is irregular in all its forms, except the gerund, participle, future indicative, and conditional.12 Turning to valencies, the verb colher ‘harvest’ is highly regular because its diatheses are common to many other verbs, whereas cheirar ‘smell’ and aproximar ‘come close’ have idiosyncratic diatheses, which occur with no other verbs.13 Colher is, then, valentially more prototypical than cheirar and aproximar. On the other hand, all three verbs are morphologically prototypical, since they inflect regularly. Finally, one can say that mesa ‘table’ is a prototypical “noun” because  Dar has 24 irregular forms out of a total of 39, perder has only 5/39 (counting only forms current in the spoken language). 13  Cheirar, as seen, shares a diathesis with feder ‘stink’; aproximar is the only verb in the language that takes a Goal complement with the preposition de. 12

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it can be head of an NP, and semantically can be referential, and nothing else, whereas velho can be all this, plus a modifier, semantically a reference restrictor, and is therefore a less prototypical “noun”.14 Again, it is only analysis by features that allows us to state prototypicity with precision.

6.5.2 Research Strategy The research strategy to be followed when looking for prototypes should be a bottom-up one: we start with the assumption (to be corrected later) that every item is different from all others, and analyze them each in its own terms. Once we have a sufficient number of analyzed elements, the search for groupings can begin. Turning again to verb valencies (an area in which we already have some material to work on), we find situations like the one reported in the list given further. We start by listing each verb with the diatheses in which it occurs. Taking a sample of ten verbs, we get abaixar ‘lower’  occurs in  C1, C4, C34 aumentar ‘increase’    C1, C4, C34 babar ‘drool’       C1, C2 beliscar ‘pinch’         C1, C2 cair ‘fall’          C4, C26, C34, C97 cantar ‘sing’           C1, C2 chamar ‘call’          C1, C2, C71, C78 chegar ‘arrive’          C23, C54, C100 falir ‘go bankrupt’     C1, C4 ter ‘have’         C8, C32, C33, C44, C113, C152, C170, Aux15

In this highly restricted set of data, we can already see some tendencies: the valency composed only of C1 and C2 applies to three out of the ten verbs; these same two diatheses occur with chamar ‘call’, which also has C71 and C78; the set C1, C4 applies to three, and two of them also have C34. On the other hand, one verb (cair ‘fall’) has C4 and C34, but not C1, and besides occurs in two other diatheses (C26, C97), common to 14 15

 If we assume a traditional definition of “noun” as a word that refers to a thing.  ‘Aux’ marks verbs that can occur as auxiliaries.

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no other verb of the sample. Chegar ‘arrive’ and ter ‘have’ are totally idiosyncratic, and have no diathesis in common with any other verb in this set. Even with this small sample (10, out of about 3000 verbs in the spoken language), the complexity of the classification is evident. We have classes in the traditional sense (e.g., babar, beliscar, cantar, with identical valencies); we have idiosyncratic items (chegar, ter). Chamar has C1 and C2, but also C71 and C78. And abaixar, aumentar, falir all have C1, C4; but abaixar and aumentar, not falir, also have C34. We are evidently dealing with overlapping categories, in several ways and to several degrees—something that can be described with precision by using features, but not by determining discrete groups of items. The selection of facts given above for these ten verbs, from the point of view of these diatheses, can be shown as a set of classes, as in Class A (C1, C2) babar beliscar cantar Class B (C1, C2, C71, C78) chamar Class C (C1, C4, C34): abaixar aumentar Class D (C1, C4) falir Class E (C4, C26, C34, C97) cair Class F (C23, C54, C100) chegar Class G (C8, C32, C33, C44, C113, C152, C170, Aux) ter.

The picture is complex enough: 7 classes for 10 verbs, which occur in 19 diatheses (counting the feature of being able to function as an Auxiliary). It may seem that the resulting picture is not of much use, but only if one insists on seeing separate classes; a much more convenient position is to stress the features themselves. Although it may be too early to assert it definitely, I suspect that features are recurrent, classes much less so. The features we use here have a concrete content and refer to occurrence in specific diatheses: something that can be directly verified on the data. That is, the fact that beliscar ‘pinch’ occurs in C1 C1    VSubj>Agent    V    NP>Patient [15] O Carlos beliscou o bebê.     ‘Carlos pinched the baby’

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can be considered an observational fact, while the positioning of this verb in a particular class is the result of theorization. As for the definition of classes, some associations of features are prototypical, with or without association of additional features; and some sets are highly idiosyncratic, applying, to the limit, to only one verb in the language. There are known examples of both these situations, namely: The association of C1 plus C4 is frequent among verbs (8 in a list of 50), and, as seen in 6.2.2, also shows a diachronic tendency to increase by extending to new verbs. An example is esquentar ‘warm’, which occurs in [16] A enfermeira esquentou o leite.   (C1) ‘the nurse warmed the milk’ [17] O leite esquentou.   (C4) ‘the milk warmed’

This association may occur with additional features that distinguish the verbs; for instance, we saw earlier that abaixar ‘lower’ and aumentar ‘increase’ also have C34, which esquentar does not: [18] O leite abaixou/aumentou/*esquentou de temperatura. ‘the milk decreased/increased/*warmed in temperature’

The large set of diatheses seen earlier for ter ‘have’, namely C8, C32, C33, C44, C113, C152, C170, Aux, does not appear with any other verb, which makes ter a unique verb. This, of course, is no news; but we can now describe its uniqueness in precise terms: ter is the only verb in the language that can occur in all these constructions. Returning now to our research strategy, we can start out by the provisional assumption that every verb is unique, and then go on to compare verbs among them, so that we find valential groupings (classes). And such groupings do not constitute mutually exclusive classes: abaixar, aumentar, and esquentar are part of one group as far as occurrence in C1 + C4 is concerned, but esquentar differs from the other two because it does not

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have C34 in its valency. This is not an exceptional example: it is rather typical, and is the main reason why the analysis by features must be at the basis of word classification.

References Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969. Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bybee, Joan L., and C. L. Moder. 1983. Morphological classes as natural categories. Language 59: 251–270. Gross, Maurice. 1975. Méthodes en syntaxe [Methods in syntax]. Paris: Hermann. Kempton, W. 1981. The folk classification of ceramics: A study of cognitive prototypes. New York: Academic Press. Labov, William. 1973. The boundaries of words and their meanings. In Bailey, Charles-James and Roger W. Shuy (eds.), New ways of analyzing variation in English. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume I, theoretical prerequisites. Stanford University Press. Næss, Åshild. 2007. Prototypical transitivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Perini, Mário A. 2015. Describing verb valency: Practical and theoretical issues. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Rosch, E. 1973. Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 4: 328–350. ———. 1975. Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104: 192–233. ———. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B.B. Lloyd. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ross, John Robert. 1972. The category squish: Endstation Hauptwort. In Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Talmy, Leonard. 2007. Foreword. In Methods in cognitive linguistics, ed. M.  González-Márquez, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J. Spivey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taylor, John. 2002. Cognitive grammar. Oxford University Press.

7 Assignment by Default

7.1 The Next Step: The Limits of Grammar 7.1.1 Linguistic Relevance of Features We saw that classifying words depends on finding the features associated with each of them; two words are members of the same class, strictly speaking, when they share exactly the same set of features. This raises a problem: it is not easy to find words precisely identical in all their features. Even words so close in their grammatical behavior and meaning as knife, spoon and fork show some difference when looked at from the appropriate viewpoint—and rightly so, otherwise why would we need three words? But if things are like this, how can we classify words in a grammatically meaningful way? Will we not end up with as many classes as lexical items? The answer is that not all features are grammatically relevant: just as a difference in voice color is not relevant in phonology, the difference between knife, spoon, and fork is not relevant for grammatical purposes. What we must do is, then, select those features that are grammatically relevant and base our classification on them—since we are classifying in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. A. Perini, Function and Class in Linguistic Description, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6_7

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order to describe linguistic structure. And a feature is grammatically relevant when it is mentioned by grammatical rules: for instance, the property of being potentially referential, [+R], is relevant because it controls the possibility of an item occurring as an NP head, while the property of referring to a cutting instrument (knife, not fork) does not appear in any grammatical rule, and must be set aside as far as descriptive purposes are concerned. These properties are part of the schemas evoked by the lexical items knife, spoon, and fork—that is, they describe our knowledge of these objects, and are not part of language. What the language establishes about these items are properties like “occurrence in the double-­ noun construction” (knife handle), with simple juxtaposition and the construction head postposed to the modifying element; here English differs from Portuguese, where the same information must be structured by using a preposition (de), and the head is at the beginning of the construction: cabo de faca ‘knife handle’, where cabo means ‘handle’, and faca ‘knife’. Correspondingly, the information that knife participates in a construction of this form is part of the English language, whereas the information that it denotes a cutting instrument, made of metal, and having a handle, has nothing to do with English.1 This criterion sounds obvious enough, and not too difficult to apply, yet it has sometimes been ignored. For instance Gross (1975, p.  305) assigns to the French verb vouloir ‘want’ a [+Human] subject, which is not a lexical property of this word—not a feature of the French language; rather, it is a feature of the schema WANT, namely part of our understanding of what it is to want something, namely a feeling normally attributed to animate beings, including humans. To take another example, from the description of verb valencies, the differences between the action schemas CONFISCATE, SHELTER, and FOREST are pretty evident; yet Portuguese expresses all three schemas by using verbs (respectively confiscar, acolher, and arborizar) that show the same valency. Thus, the schema informs that “CONFISCATE is to  As is known, languages differ widely in their use of features for grammatical purposes. As an extreme example, Trask (1992, p. 44) mentions the semantic feature “long-stemmed flower” as one of the criteria in noun classification in Malay. In English a parallel phenomenon can be observed in the difference between the ways to express plurality of cat (two cats) and cattle (two heads of cattle, not *two cattles). 1

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take over property legally”, while the language informs that the verb confiscar (which evokes that schema) “has a subject Agent and an object Patient”, with reference to definitions of Agent and Patient that allow the “confiscating entity” to be elaborated from the Agent, and the “confiscated thing” from the Patient. And the language says exactly the same about the other two verbs, although elaboration yields different ETRs for each verb; these elaborations are not linguistic (or at least not language-­ specific), but part of our world knowledge. We must conclude that as far as valency is concerned these verbs are grammatically identical, although of course they denote very different actions. It is interesting to note that nonlinguistic features are liable to violations in particular contexts—for instance, in Machado de Assis’s tale “Um apólogo” [an apologue] a needle argues with a thread spool by using expressions showing that both must be human in some sense.2 This is pretty common in fables, where features like [Human] are typically manipulated by the author. Now, strictly linguistic features such as grammatical person or occurrence in C1 cannot be manipulated: [1] * The boy work. [2] * Harry happened an accident.

No context can save such ill-formed sentences. On the other hand, there is no reason why a particular language cannot use a feature like [Human] or [Animate] as grammatical tools; but this must show in its grammatical structure, which is not the case in French, English, or Portuguese. But in Spanish the preposition a is used to mark an object when it is animate: vi la casa ‘I saw the house’, vi a tu hermana ‘I saw your sister’. In Russian, the same semantic distinction governs the case of the object: ja videl stol ‘I saw the table [accusative]’, but ja videl maljčika ‘I saw the boy [genitive]’. In the grammar of these languages it makes sense to refer to the feature [Animate], since it works in some rule. The reason is not simply naturalistic—both Spanish and English speakers know the difference between animate and inanimate beings—but structural. The conclusion is that, among the crowd of  Apud Leão (2015).

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features of meaning conveyed by a language, a difference must be established between those that belong to the structure of the language and those that do not: we are in fact drawing the boundary between language and world knowledge.3 We already know that classification depends on descriptive objective; and, if this objective is describing valency, the verbs confiscar ‘confiscate’, acolher ‘shelter’ and arborizar ‘forest’ must be classified together. From other points of view they may have to split into several classes: for instance, confiscar and arborizar belong to the so-called first conjugation (confiscar, confiscando, confiscado, etc.), while acolher belongs to the second one (acolher, acolhendo, acolhido, etc.). But the fact that usually one confiscates property, shelter refugees, and forest land is not relevant for any grammatical objective in Portuguese.

7.1.2 Effect on Valency Description In many cases the relevance criterion is implicitly adopted, and grammars usually do not try to class verbs apart because their object is animate or not. But in other cases similar classifications are attempted, to my mind as a result of not paying attention to the linguistic relevance of features. This appears very clearly in the description of verb valencies. First, let us consider that valency is one aspect of verb taxonomy. Traditional grammars subclassify verbs into transitive, intransitive, copulative, and so on, and these subclasses are defined in terms we may call valential; for instance, […] transitive verbs take a direct object; some in addition permit an indirect object, and these will be distinguished as DITRANSITIVE. [Quirk et al. 1972, p. 38]

This is basically what we do when we subclassify verbs by valency. But, for one thing, traditional subclasses are far too few to cover the great  The possibility of establishing this boundary is, as is known, questioned by some linguists; I do not intend to enter this discussion here, but may add that keeping the two kinds of knowledge apart seems to yield good results, descriptively speaking. 3

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variety of cases that can be observed in fact; without coming to the extreme described by Gross (see Sect. 4.3.1), we have already seen in previous chapters that the number of subclasses must be higher than traditionally contemplated. But the number of subclasses is possibly not as high as it may seem at first sight, because in some cases irrelevant features may have been taken into account. There are several ways to reduce the number of features relevant for classification; some were mentioned in Sect. 6.5.2—for instance, we can consider that prototypical associations of features can free the learner from acquiring all features involved: if, for instance, it is found that for most verbs occurrence in C4 entails occurrence in C1, all a learner has to do is learn the exceptions—just as, when confronted with a verb whose infinitive ends in –ar, she may assume that it will inflect like amar ‘love’; the exceptions like dar ‘give’ are few. No special effort is then needed to learn separately the conjugation of andar ‘walk’, estudar ‘study’, and so on. Analogously, if the prototype rule “if a verb has C4, then it has C1” holds, many verbs that occur in C1 will not have to be separately learned as individual cases. At present we do not know how extensive this phenomenon is, but it undeniably exists, and should be included in the description, which correspondingly will become less complex. The real amount of complexity, of course, will be known only after a sufficiently wide survey of all verbs is available. Valency notation, as currently conceived, includes a lot of redundancy; for instance, no account is taken of prototype relations such as “if C4, then C1”. Another important factor not incorporated into the entries of the Valency dictionary, but important for a proper understanding of the phenomenon, is what I have called assignment of ETRs by default. This is explained and instanced in detail in Perini (2019, chapter 7); here I give a summary, which will suffice for our exposition. Assignment by default is not included in the entries of the Dictionary because the latter is conceived of as an instrument to be used by linguists of many persuasions, who may not agree with the particular cases where assignments are not attributed to the valency of the verb. But in my opinion assignment by default is an important factor, and deserves further investigation.

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7.2 Assignment by Default 7.2.1 Schemas I have been mentioning schemas, in particular in relation with their evocation by lexical items, in particular verbs. Let us now have a quick look at some of their features which are relevant for the building of cognitive representations (CRs). A schema is a mental framework relative to some concept; for our purposes, mainly actions, events, and states, as well as things and properties of things. Schemas and their associations are stored in memory, and one of their functions is to enable the mind to build and identify cognitive representations at various levels. Here we will be concerned only with schemas evoked by lexical items, and their variables, which in their turn are filled in by other schemas. An example will make this clearer; suppose a sentence is uttered, [1] Jim gave the girl a toy.

The task facing the receptor is to build a well-formed CR on the basis of the information provided by the sentence, plus relevant aspects of her world knowledge. One of the mechanisms put to use for that end is the properties of lexical items to evoke schemas. Thus, the verb, gave, evokes the schema GIVE;4 also the words Jim, girl, and toy evoke their respective schemas (let us leave aside the, a, as well as the marks of tense on the verb, to keep the explanation simple). These schemas get integrated mainly because GIVE contains, besides the basic meaning of “transfer possession”, three variables, labeled “donor”, “recipient”, and “given thing”: [3] GIVE → “donor”     → “recipient”     → “given thing”

The variables are an integral part of the concept: if there is no “donor”, no “recipient”, or no “given thing”, then we are not dealing with an event of “giving”.  Schemas are notated here in CAPITALS, and represent concepts, not words.

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The variables, as seen, are not filled in—that is, we know there is a “donor”, but his identity is still open. The sentence provides us with a candidate, namely JIM, which can then be understood as the “donor”; we can represent this graphically as GIVE → “donor” = JIM

or, filling in all the gaps provided by the variables,   [4] GIVE → “donor” = JIM       → “recipient” = GIRL       → “given thing” = TOY

In what interests us, this is the CR corresponding to sentence [1]: the schema evoked by the verb, with its variables filled in (bound) by schemas evoked by the complements. Another important detail: the relation between each variable and the complement that codes it syntactically is given in the valency of the verb, here the diathesis5 [2] VSubj>Agent V NP>Recipient NP>Mover

so that one cannot understand from [1], say, that the girl gave Jim a toy. But [2] does not mention the “donor”, or the “given thing”, rather the Agent and the Mover; how can it relate then with the CR shown in [4]? The answer is that the “donor” (an ETR) can be recognized as an elaboration of the semantic role Agent;6 of course the schema only contains ETRs (cognitive relations), not semantic roles, which are grammatical markers. Thus, from [2] plus the elaboration process, we are able to connect the Agent, namely the ETR “donor”, with the subject of [1]. There is a lot to be said about schemas; but for our immediate purposes we only need the information about its cognitive core (GIVE) and its variables.

 The designation Theme for the entity that undergoes motion is common in the literature, and I have used it in my previous books. But it is an inconvenient term, since many authors use it in several very different meanings; I have accordingly substituted Mover, which is less ambiguous (I follow here Langacker 1991). 6  See explanation of ETRs, semantic roles and elaboration in Sects. 3.2.4–3.2.5. 5

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7.2.2 What Is a Language For? A language establishes a relation between formal units, on one hand, and cognitive representations on the other. This is what language is for, and it is something to be required as a minimum of any linguistic description.7 Everything else is instrumental; it is as if the language were not concerned about the means used to achieve the main goal of connecting form and cognitive representation, provided that they work. And, as the examination of many cases shows, these means are a pretty heterogeneous lot. Among them we have assignment by default, based on the use of schema components which are described earlier. Let us take an example to make this clear. Take the sentence [5] The Incas worshipped the sun.

An analysis along traditional lines would assign to the subject the semantic role Agent, to the object the role Patient. But this analysis raises two important problems: the first is the definition of the role Patient, and the second is the redundant information that this analysis entails. Let examine these problems in order.

7.2.3 What Is a Patient? There is a tolerable agreement on what is an Agent;8 but there is no consensual idea of what should count as a Patient. This question is considered in some detail in Perini (2019, chapter 11), and here I return on it in a more summary manner: to jump to a conclusion, let us admit that the Patient is

 At least nowadays. Until the mid-twentieth century some linguists attempted to work exclusively on the formal side of language, cf. Harris (1951). Hockett (1958, pp. 137–138) places the semantic subsystem in the periphery, suggesting that it be relegated to some “sister science” to linguistics. He adds that “anyone is free to focus on the central subsystems [grammar, understood as syntax plus morphology, phonology, and morphophonemics/MAP] or to invade the peripheral ones as he pleases”. I doubt that many linguists would accept this view today. 8  With some variation; see Perini (2015, section 4.7.1). 7

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the entity that undergoes a change of state, understanding this change in a rather broad way: after the event, the changed entity shows some ascertainable difference from what it was before. [Perini 2019, p. 158]

This works for cases like I ate the cheese or your words sadden me, but certainly not for sentence [5]: the Incas’ worship does not result in any change of state in the sun. And when one tries to adapt the definition to cover all cases traditionally analyzed as Patient, one finds unexpected difficulties; think of examples like I have applauded the decision, they sang the National Anthem, he wears thick glasses, I heard an explosion, the horse jumped the fence9 and many others where the object denotes some relation which does not fit in our definition. What is one to do in this case? Attempts to redefine the Patient to include all traditional cases end up watering down the notion until it loses all meaning; and we must be careful to avoid defining this (or any other) semantic role in syntactic terms, as Jackendoff warns: Given the importance [of thematic relations/MAP], it is crucial to find out what they really are, so that they have an independent life of their own. We must be sure we are not invoking them as a thinly disguised wild card to meet the exigencies of syntax. [Jackendoff 1987, p. 371]

I have proposed (Perini 2015, 2019) a solution that may look radical at first, but that not only works but also provides a way to better integrate the analysis into the cognitive context it belongs to by right. Let us go back to the sentence [5] The Incas worshipped the sun.

As we saw earlier, what is important here is to establish a connection between this sentence and a CR, which in this case portrays an event. One key ingredient is the schema evoked by the verb, namely WORSHIP.  This schema includes two variables, the “worshipper” and the “worshipped thing”; if any of them is absent from the CR we do not have the concept of “worship”—in other words, worship is only conceivable if there is someone that worships something. And, it is good to note,  The last two examples are from Huddleston (1984, p. 191), where the problem is clearly identified.

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these are not semantic roles, but ETRs. The presence of the schema, WORSHIP, in the CR is provided by the verb, and no extra mechanism is needed: we just assume that evoking schemas is one of the properties of verbs (and of lexical items in general), which I think is not a controversial assumption. We need a mechanism to assign the correct ETRs to both complements of worship in [5]: suppose we apply, first,10 the prototype rule stipulating that the Agent is often (actually almost always) coded as the subject. Now, the schema evoked by the verb includes an ETR (“worshipper”) that can be recognized as an elaboration of the Agent, that is, the Agent is the “initiator of an event”, and the “worshipper” is the “initiator of a worshipping event”. We have here an ETR recognizable as an elaboration of the Agent, that is, a hyponym of this role, and according to the rule this is the subject. Therefore, the Agent (semantic role), understood in this context as the ETR “initiator of a worshipping event”, is the subject, the Incas. At this stage the object, the sun, lacks an ETR. The interpretation cannot be left like this, for two reasons: first, because the schema WORSHIP, as we saw, requires a “worshipped thing”; and, second, because no eligible constituent can lack an ETR: this is the assignment requirement, which stipulates that no constituent eligible to have an ETR is allowed to go without.11 Evidence for this requirement is the unacceptability of sentences like [6] * Jim ate the cookie the pizza. [7] * She is fond of you of me.

although here syntactic factors may be at work as well. In any case, the interpretation of sentence [5] must be completed; and it is, along the following lines:  Terms like “first” and so on do not imply an ordering or rules; they are used for ease of exposition only. 11  The converse situation, an ETR without an overt complement, is acceptable, and results in schematic filling-in, as in she is reading (necessarily, something). I avoid using the term “theta criterion”, which is, first, usually conceived of as grammatical, whereas the assignment requirement applies to CRs, and only mentions ETRs, not semantic roles; and, second, because I do not agree with the theta criterion’s one-to-one correlation between theta roles and complements (“arguments”). 10

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(a) [5] has two complements (subject and object); (b) one of these, the subject, is assigned a semantic role (Agent), which elaborates as the ETR “immediate initiator of a worshipping event”; (c) the other complement lacks any thematic relation, and (let us say) there is no grammatical means to complete it; (d) the schema WORSHIP requires a “worshipped thing”; (e) the complement the sun is eligible to be understood as the “worshipped thing”: it is an NP, and we know that NPs are the main way to refer to things; (f ) then, in accordance with the assignment requirement, we assign the ETR “worshipped thing” to the complement the sun, and the CR is completed in a satisfactory way. As seen, the assignment of an ETR to the subject begins in grammar, by applying a prototype rule (Agentsubject), and goes on along extragrammatical procedures, elaborating the Agent into the correct ETR for this complement. The assignment of the ETR to the object bypasses grammar entirely, and relies on information contained in the schema. In simple words: we know that the Incas are the “worshippers” because so the grammar of the language stipulates; and we know that the sun is the “worshipped thing” because we know that no worship is possible without some kind of deity being involved. This analysis may seem complicated at first sight, but is in fact quite simple, for it makes maximal use of previously available information. The result of this process is adequate for the building of a well-formed CR, which of course contains ETRs, but not semantic roles or syntactic functions. This is assignment by default, a process that applies to many cases, and fills in the lacunae left by assignment of semantic roles by diathesis or prototype rule. As we just saw, the presence of a semantic role is not necessary in every case. What is necessary is the presence of ETRs leading to the construction of the CR; the way an ETR is accessed or derived does not matter, provided that it becomes available. Then, in sentence [5], defining the semantic role of the object is no problem: this constituent has no semantic role, and its ETR is “worshipped thing”, taken directly from the evoked schema WORSHIP.

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The final result can be represented as12 WORSHIP → “immediate initiator of a worshipping event” = INCAS        → “worshipped thing” = SUN

which is all we need, as far as thematic relations are concerned, in order to build a well-formed CR, here made up of the schema WORSHIP with its variables duly filled in.

7.2.4 Redundancy The system described above is less esthetically pleasing than the traditionally accepted one, and involves a heterogeneous set of procedures, some linguistic, some not. On the other hand, it is more economical, because it makes use of devices already in place, and avoids redundant information: in the usual analysis the object would be the Patient, and redundantly the “worshipped thing”, an ETR that is derivable from a variable present in the schema WORSHIP. This may be seen like shifting part of the burden of linguistic analysis on to the shoulders of cognitive science—but it may be observed that it does not add anything to the cognitive face of the phenomenon, merely makes more efficient use of available information. And there is no real reason to believe, a priori, that the assignment of ETRs is the task of linguistic rules: what is inevitable is that ETRs are part of cognitive structure. For instance, understanding the sun as the “worshipped thing” is part of the CR, independently of any abstraction—unlike the analysis of the sun as the object of the sentence, which is part of a theory of the language. Redundancy is inevitable in the case of the subject, because without having recourse to the syntactic function it would not be possible to know who worships what. In a sentence like

 This is obviously only a partial representation of the CR, omitting many factors not directly connected with valency, such as definiteness (the), tense (gave), and so on. 12

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[8] Major Atkinson killed the tiger.

the need for this distinction is evident, since the opposite, the tiger killing the Major, could be true. Once that is settled, though, the ETR of the object follows from features of the evoked schema. This frees us from the problem of how to define the Patient in the case of [5]. The semantic role Agent is needed for the statement of the prototype rule Agentsubject; we cannot say that in [5] the language user simply finds the “worshipper” to be the subject, since in [8] the subject is the “killer”, in other sentences it will be the “writer”, the “kisser”, the “kicker”, and so on. It is unlikely that people have to learn, and use, a different rule for each verb.13 Someway we must categorize all these ETRs together, and the solution is to bring together all that can be defined as “immediate initiator of an X event” under the label Agent, and state the rule by reference to this schematic relation (called in our jargon a semantic role). This is just another way to state what was seen for instance by Schlesinger (1995) in the passage quoted in Sect. 4.1, that some thematic relations are linguistically relevant because they are mentioned in the statement of grammatical rules. In our case, the rule is the one that stipulates that the Agent (not merely the “worshipper” or the “killer”) is prototypically the subject. Now, a question that must be asked is whether the same can apply to all cases of Patient, including the tiger in [8], where the object is indeed “the entity that undergoes a change of state”. The fact is that assignment by default yields the right result here; but it may also be that the Patient (so defined) proves to be a linguistically relevant thematic relation. This depends on the discovery in the language of a rule that crucially refers to the Patient; in this case we will be justified in postulating Patient as a semantic role, at least as far as the statement of that rule is concerned. But are there in the language rules referring to the Patient? I think we have a plausible candidate, which is the rule that governs the generation of the ergative construction, instanced by

 Langacker (1991) saw this, but since he does not admit an opposition between semantic roles and ETRs, he ends up without a solution (see quote in Sect. 3.2.2). 13

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[9] The vase broke.

The idea goes back to Fillmore (1970), who proposed a distinction among verbs between change of state (e.g., scratch) versus surface contact (e.g., touch); only the former would, in our present terms, occur in the ergative construction. That is, the hypothesis is that the ergative construction requires a subject to be an entity that undergoes a change of state; if confirmed, this will be definite evidence for the semantic role Patient, since it is a generalization which is valid in the language and can only be expressed by using that semantic role. What is still needed is an ample survey of all verbs, which may show the extent of the rule, as well as eventual exceptions. As for cases where both the definition of Patient and assignment by default may work, such as in sentence [8], it is not too clear what to do. I can see three possible solutions: (a) one could adopt the principle that “once a semantic role, always a semantic role”, and in this case the verb (kill in [8]) will have in its valency a diathesis with the object marked for Patient; or (b) one could leave this complement blank for thematic relation in the diathesis, and let assignment by default take its course; or, finally, (c) one could admit that both ways of processing the sentence are available to the language user, so that in some cases he may fill in the object by reference to the diathesis, in other cases bypass the valency of the verb and assign the ETR by default. Levels are mixed in the last solution, with the system making use, opportunistically, of whatever resources may be at hand. The connection between form and meaning is achieved, and that is what really matters. A really secure solution may be unattainable at present, given the lack of direct psycholinguistic evidence; for the moment, I tend toward the third solution, which avoids the “once a semantic role, always a semantic role” principle as superfluous, and allows a simpler solution to be available for sentences like [8], which as we know are extremely frequent. In this case, we may have a semantic role Patient, which must work in certain cases (when the rule refers to it), or not, when assignment by default is available—according to the speaker’s convenience in an actual communicative situation.14  We may also remember that object NPs with the role Agent seem to be forbidden, so that the tiger in [8] cannot in any case be understood as the Agent. 14

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As will be seen in the next chapter, the considerations of this chapter have important consequences for the classification of verbs according to their valencies.

7.2.5 Core and Periphery There is still one last important point to be explained, before proceeding. I said earlier, for instance, that the schema GIVE contains, besides the basic meaning of “transfer possession”, three variables, labeled “donor”, “recipient”, and “given thing”. Certainly, no event of giving is conceivable without the existence of these variables—not all of them necessarily explicit in the syntax, but necessarily understood as present, if sometimes unfilled-in by lexical material. Now, there are other variables that are equally necessary, but were not mentioned: any event of giving must take place at some moment in time, in some location, and in some manner. Why are these variables not involved in assignment by default? For instance, why no constituent in [8] Major Atkinson killed the tiger.

gets the thematic relation “location”, or “time”, by default? Variables of the first kind, which participate in assignment by default, are called core variables; the other are peripheral. This distinction is found, for example, in Ruppenhofer et al. (2006), with a partially different definition than the one used here. There is some empirical evidence that core variables are more immediately accessible to language users than peripheral ones, so that the former are preferentially considered for filling in vacant constituents.15 But perhaps the main factor at work is that core variables are very often coded as NPs, which is the main thematically unmarked unit: we have NPs with the role of Agent, Patient, and even Recipient, whereas peripheral variables very strongly tend to be coded by constructions explicitly marked for thematic relation, often by prepositions, but also sometimes by specialized items such as yesterday, here, carefully. For instance, NPs expressing Location do exist, but in limited environments, such as the ones exemplified in Sect. 6.5.1.  Evidence for this is reported in Lima, Pinha, and Perini (ms); it is summarized in Perini (2015, section 5.1). 15

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A result of this distinction is that assignment by default makes use almost exclusively of core variables, which of course makes it easier to decode—there is no point in seeking a locative, causal, or temporal meaning for the sun in sentence [5], which leaves the way open for the ETR “worshipped thing”.

7.3 A  ssignment by Default in Production and Reception I have been treating the matter of assignment by default mainly from the point of view of reception and understanding. A question may arise whether, and to which extent, the same considerations work for production as well. The answer is that they do in part, but there are specific aspects that refer to each of these activities. We may observe first that production of utterances is a more demanding task than understanding, because it must follow formal rules; for instance, the information that the schema WORSHIP includes a “worshipper” and a “worshipped thing” is relevant both for understanding (as we have seen in this chapter) and for production. In the former case the task is to identify the complement that is associated with each of these ETRs, and in the latter case the task is to find a way to express these ETRs. The main difference is that in reception the complements are already provided by the syntactic structure of the sentence, so that the task is only to assign each of them the correct ETR (with the complications we have seen); but in production the complements must be provided, on the basis of syntactic rules, plus the valential marks of the verb, when relevant. In the case of worship the sentence has a subject and an object (a nonsubject NP); and the producer, having this linguistic information in hand, must find to which of these complements each of the ETRs of the schema corresponds. This appears more clearly in a case like [9] O Jair bateu no meu cachorro. [no=em+o]     ‘Jair beat my dog’ [lit.: on my dog]

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where the Patient appears as a prepositional phrase with em. This is a piece of information a receptor can do without, because the schema is SPANK,16 which includes a “spanker” and a “spanked entity”; once informed that Jair is the “spanker”, what is left, the dog, must be the “spanked entity”. But for production only this is not sufficient: the emitter must know that, with the verb bater, the “spanked entity”, namely, the Patient, must be introduced by the preposition em—valential information the receptor can do without. Production and reception are then different tasks, and the former depends on more information than the latter—a fact that is well-known to foreign language teachers. But both tasks depend, in part, on the same information about thematic relations, available at all times. The language user, regardless of the specific task he is performing, has global and simultaneous access to the relevant information, but the emitter must make use of more information than the receptor. And linguistic description must include all relevant information, regardless whether it works for production or reception.

References Fillmore, Charles J. 1970. The grammar of hitting and breaking. In Readings in English transformational grammar, ed. Roderick Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum. Waltham, MA: Ginn. Gross, Maurice. 1975. Méthodes en syntaxe [Methods in syntax]. Paris: Hermann. Harris, Zellig S. 1951. Structural linguistics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan. Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge University Press. Jackendoff, Ray S. 1987. The status of thematic relations in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 18 (3): 369–411. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

16

 Framenet: corporal_punishment.

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Leão, Ângela Vaz. 2015. ‘Um apólogo’ de Machado de Assis em seis vozes [‘Um apólogo’ by Machado de Assis in six voices]. Belo Horizonte: Ed. PUCMinas. Perini, Mário A. 2015. Describing verb valency: Practical and theoretical issues. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ———. 2019. Thematic relations: A study in the grammar-cognition interface. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1972. A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman. Ruppenhofer, Josef, et  al. 2006. FrameNet II: Extended theory and practice. framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu. Schlesinger, Izchak M. 1995. Cognitive space and linguistic case: Semantic and syntactic categories in English. Cambridge University Press. Trask, R.L. 1992. A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. London: Routledge.

Part II Descriptive Application

8 Classification of Verbs

8.1 Criteria of Classification In this chapter I refer to verb lexemes, not to individual verb forms, which, as seen in Sect. 4.7.1, are words. We saw there that verb forms (words) in a lexeme are not necessarily in the same class, or rather do not have exactly the same features: thus, an infinitive can be head of an NP, which a finite form cannot. But a lexeme also has its own features, which are valid for all words included in it; for instance, the valency of a verb can be defined for the whole lexeme, since there is no example of a particular verb form, distinct for person, number, tense, or aspect, with special valential features. If comer ‘eat’ takes an object Patient, so do comi ‘(I) ate’, comendo ‘eating’, and comeremos ‘(we) will eat’.1 The conclusion is that both words and lexemes must be classified, each according to its features.

 This statement must be qualified for the case of the participle. But there is evidence that the so-­ called participle in Portuguese in fact corresponds to two forms, only one of them belonging to the verb lexeme, sharing its valential properties, the other being a derived item that does not belong to the verb lexeme (see Perini 2015, Appendix 6). 1

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Verbs are, among word classes, arguably the best-defined group. A verb is a peculiar type of lexeme, made up of an association of specific forms. This is most evident in languages like Portuguese, with its rich morphology, showing oppositions of person, tense, and mood, to a total of tens of forms; but even in English the morphological marks are present, and are sufficient, with some help from syntax, to characterize verbs as opposed to other word classes: hand has “nominal” features, but the same word also occurs with verbal suffixes in verbal environments, as in she hands me the money; handed; handing, and so on, whereas it is easy to show that no verb hair exists in the language. In English there are very few borderline cases (ought, must), and in Portuguese none—even so-called defective verbs all show enough verbal forms so that no doubt about their classification arises. On the other hand, within the class of verbs there are subclasses, according to several different criteria. Here I intend to go over some of the subclasses of the main class of verbs, examining them critically as to their proper definition. One pretty obvious criterion is the degree of regularity of its morphology: verbs in Portuguese are classified into first, second, and third conjugations (e.g., respectively, amar ‘love’, vender ‘sell’, abrir ‘open’). And concomitantly, they may be regular, when their morphology is shared with many other verbs of the same conjugation, or irregular, when it is unique, or when it shares its forms with only a few other verbs. In the first case we have amar ‘love’, which is morphologically identical with andar ‘walk’, pintar ‘paint’, empurrar ‘push’, and hundreds of others. A uniquely irregular verb is dar ‘give’, which is different in some of its forms from any other verb; and a partially irregular is perder, ‘lose’, which agrees with other verbs of the second conjugation in most forms, but has a few (5, out of 39 forms current in the spoken language) which are irregular. And there are cases in between, so that here we have, strictly speaking, several subtypes to define. Another very common criterion of verb classification is semantics: verbs of action, of state, psychological verbs, and so on; and, more specifically, verbs of feeding, of dressing well, of change of possession, and so on.2 This subclassification is of course important, but the way it is usually  These categories are from Levin (1993).

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understood is partially incorrect, because most verbs can occur in more than one type of construction, and accordingly they express, say, an action, an event, or a motion, or a quality, and so on. An extreme example is Portuguese passar, which can, among many others, have the following readings:    ACTION [1] Ele passou minha camisa com cuidado.     ‘he pressed my shirt carefully’    EVENT [2] A dor passou rapidamente.     ‘the pain passed quickly’    QUALITY [3] Essa comida passa.     ‘this food is (barely) acceptable’    MOTION [4] O ônibus acaba de passar aqui.     ‘the bus has just passed here’

This verb is not exceptional; a rapid survey of the entries in any dictionary shows that verbs with just one basic acception are almost an exception. Now, is passar a verb of action, of event, of quality or of motion? Clearly, none of these labels suffices, by itself, to characterize the semantic behavior of this verb. What can be assigned labels like “of action” and the like are the constructions, not individual verbs. The latter will be said to have the property of occurring in constructions of action, of event, and so on. Splitting passar and comparable verbs into several lexical items is no solution, for the reasons seen in Sect. 4.4. What we have here, instead, is a set of features, associated with one lexical item, and the only way to properly categorize passar is by listing all these features—the four given above plus several others, since this is a complex verb. Each verb is necessarily associated with a set of such features, which describe an important part of their meaning, along with their

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grammatical behavior. Classification of verbs according to such semantic properties will not be pursued here, but it is a relevant topic of inquiry. Some initial steps were taken in works like Levin (1993) and for Portuguese Borba (1990) and Cançado et al. (2013), but I feel there is still a lot to be done, mainly in the theoretical aspects of the description.

8.2 Valential Classification of Verbs Valency is one of the criteria used to categorize verbs; thus, a verb that can occur in a particular diathesis must be classified separately from a verb that does not occur in that diathesis. And two verbs will be classified together if their valencies are identical—that is, if they can occur in precisely the same set of diatheses. We have seen some examples in Sect. 6.5.2, where I mentioned a survey of 50 verbs which had to be put into 45 classes; and I observed that learning and actual use is likely to be aimed at the features, rather than at the classes themselves. In any case, each verb has a valency of its own, and large sets of verbs with the same valency are relatively rare. But some features seem to be particularly important, and may provide a shortcut. Actually, the importance of these features is mostly based on traditional intuitions; but we know that traditional analyses frequently arise from observation. What is lacking is clear, theoretically defensible definitions.

8.2.1 E  ffect of Assignment by Default and Prototype Rules One of the shortcuts leading to a simplification of verb classes is assignment by default, explained in Chap. 7. How does this analytical device affect the definition of subclasses within the general class of verbs? The answer is that it has the effect of making the subclass system simpler, with fewer valentially definable classes. Valency is one of the many criteria by which verbs must be classified. To recapitulate, traditional grammar distinguishes very few types of verbs, according to this criterion: intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, and

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copulative. Now, if we take as a criterion occurrence in diatheses, we shall certainly need many more subclasses of verbs. Is there a way to make this system simpler, and yet not lose empirical adequacy? As it happens, there is—if we introduce assignment by default and prototype rules into our analysis. To show this, let us work on some examples. We saw in Chap. 7 that a sentence like [5] The Incas worshipped the sun.

can be analyzed as one realization of the diathesis [6] VSubj    V    NP

where only the syntactic structure is shown. The subject will get its thematic relation by a prototype rule, Agentsubject; and the object will be filled in with the ETR “worshipped thing” by default, that is, by direct reference to the evoked schema, WORSHIP. Now take a sentence with a complement traditionally analyzed as a predicative: [7] Elizabeth is that brunette girl.

The syntax is again [6], yet this sentence might be analyzed as a realization of a different diathesis, because of the difference in thematic relations of the two complements: instead of Agent and “worshipped thing”, we have here two entities asserted to be the same; this ETR always comes in pairs, for obvious reasons.3 But is the difference due to the valency of the verb (worship vs. be), or a necessary derivation from the evoked schema, BE.EQUAL?4 This schema comprises two variables referring to two things asserted to be equal (or coreferent); suppose we leave both complements blank, which will reduce the diathesis to [6] for this sentence. The two complements will then receive the same ETR (“X equal to Y”), by default. We do not even need to know which is the thematic  ‘αRef ’ in the Valency dictionary. Thematic relations like this are said to be paired.  Be is a pretty complex verb, and can evoke other schemas, which do not concern us here.

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relation to be assigned to the subject: “Elizabeth is that brunette girl” and “that brunette girl is Elizabeth” are, thematically speaking, the same thing.5 Therefore, there is no real problem in analyzing [7] as yet another realization of diathesis [6]. This way, we simplify the classification of verbs at this point, because, as far as this diathesis is concerned, the verbs worship and be belong to the same class. This kind of simplification can be applied to many cases, resulting in a substantive simplification in the class system of verbs. The same analysis works for [8] Elizabeth resembles that brunette girl.

The sentence asserts an apparent identity of two entities. We might assign a different feature to both complements, since after all the sentence means something different from [7]. But this would be to attribute features of our concept of resemblance to the structure of English, which is at least redundant. The best solution is then to analyze [8] as another elaboration of diathesis [6], leaving the “resemblance” ingredient to the charge of the schema, RESEMBLE, which among other things contains the information that what the sentence asserts about Elizabeth is only an appearance, or is true only partially. This works because there is no need to distinguish the thematic relation of the subject and the object, since they are the same: thematically, [8] means the same as that brunette girl resembles Elizabeth. Of course, this cannot be applied to all cases; here, we take advantage of the fact that both complements (in [8] as in [7]) are NPs, and that the ETRs present in both schemas are compatible with expression by NPs. The solution fails to work in [9] Elizabeth is with that brunette girl.

because a with-phrase cannot be referential6; this prevents us from understanding that Elizabeth is that brunette girl. Besides, of course, the syntax is different from [6].  They differ as to which is the topic, but this is not a valential matter. Meaning has several layers, as is known. 6  That is, it does not have [+R] in its functional potential—except in a few cases where this is stipulated in the diathesis of the verb. 5

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Another case in which [6] does not work is [10] Honório became a werewolf.

Again, we have the same syntax, namely [6], composed of a subject, a verb, and an object NP. The schema in question, BECOME, has two core variables, something like “initial state” and “final state”. But they must be distinguished, and no known rule stipulates that the “initial state” must be assigned to the subject; therefore, here we need diathetic markings. A possible problem is that there is no semantic role available among the more common ones to express these ETRs; we have to devise a new one in order to mark, say, the subject of [10] as the “initial state”—this will represent the knowledge held by speakers that the change of state expressed in the schema BECOME identifies Honório as the entity that became a werewolf, not the other way around. Let us call this semantic role Initial.state, to occur in constructions of change of state, and the diathesis, according to this (provisional) solution, will be [11] VSubj>Initial.state    V    NP

The “final state” is coded as the object, but here there is no need to consignate this in the diathesis, since it can be filled in by default, taking the ETR directly from the schema in the usual way. Consequently, we cannot analyze sentence [10] as representing the same diathesis found in [5], [7], and [8], because the ETRs attached to the subject and object are different, unlike in sentences with ser ‘be’ and parecer ‘resemble’, where the same role is assigned to both complements. In the examples seen, the Initial.state is expressed by the subject, which suggests a prototype rule; but there are cases where it is an object (e.g., transformar água em vinho ‘turn water into wine’); I correspondingly refrain from proposing this rule, and keep [11] as a diathesis present in the valencies of some verbs that basically mean ‘become’ or ‘turn into’. For all this, I prefer to introduce a new semantic role, Initial.state, which occurs in the construction illustrated by [10].7 The ETR of the object will  This role occurs, often with syntactic differences, in the valency of several verbs, for example, virar ‘become’, (se) converter ‘id.’, reduzir ‘reduce’, transformar ‘turn (into)’, and others. 7

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be provided by default, on the basis of the evoked schema, BECOME, which includes the variables “initial state” and “final state”; once the subject is identified as the former, the latter will be automatically assigned to the complement. This analysis claims that the information provided by the structure of the language is, for [5], [7], and [8], just what is in [6]; but for [10] the grammar must provide the semantic role of the subject, and the diathesis is [11]. The remaining thematic information is provided by the meaning of each verb, that is, the schema it evokes, plus its variables. In this particular, then, we are drawing the limit between language and world knowledge. Examples [5], [7], and [8], all analyzable as elaborations of [6], illustrate the effect of assignment by default on the subclassification of verbs on the basis of their valential properties. This kind of cleaning up of features can be done on many diatheses, and will no doubt result in a simpler classification of verbs according to their valencies; how much simpler, of course, will only be seen after the work is done. But the results are relevant not only for grammatical analysis but also for a realistic assessment of the task facing the language learner. What seems clear to me is that arriving at an adequate command of the use of verbs involves more than just memorizing a long list of verbs and valencies (a valency dictionary); it requires handling a complex and delicate mechanism with both linguistic and cognitive parts, which aims at the construction of the CR intended by the speaker and expressed in the sentence. Just to have an idea of the extent of the simplification that can be attained in the subclassification of verbs, consider that the syntactic configuration [6] VSubj    V    NP

is found in no less than 42 diatheses already recorded in the current version of the Valency dictionary; of these we have already examined three (underlying examples [5], [7], and [8]) which are liable to reduction to their syntactic representation alone; and one, [10], where simplification is not possible; 38 to go, then. I suspect that comparatively few of these will require explicit thematic marking in both complements; and hopefully some may be reduced to [6], with thematic assignment left to the charge of prototype rules plus the by-default mechanism.

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To add one more example, we have [13] Ninguém entendeu a explicação do cara.     ‘no one understood the guy’s explanation’

Here the subject has the semantic role Knower, defined as the information that enters, leaves, or is present in the memory (Carvalho 2012). Carvalho observed also that the Knower is always coded as the subject, which authorizes us to state the prototype rule KnowerSubject

Therefore, no thematic marking is needed for the subject, which will be assigned its role by the prototype rule. And the ETR of the object will come from the other core variable present in the schema, UNDERSTAND, namely the “known.thing”. Consequently, the diathesis underlying [13] is again [6]—that is all a language user must learn in order to produce and understand sentences containing the verb entender ‘understand’, like [13].8

8.2.2 Auxiliaries Some verbs are—or rather can be, depending to the construction—auxiliaries.9 For instance, in [14] Meu tio vai para a fazenda.     ‘my uncle goes to his farm’ [15] Meu tio vai vender a fazenda.     ‘my uncle is going to sell his farm’

the verb form vai (present of ir ‘go’) appears in two different functions. In [14] it is the VP head, but in [15] the head is vender ‘sell’, and vai is an auxiliary. The main reason for this differentiation is valency control: in  I disregard here the possibility of syntactic prototype rules, which are perfectly possible—in particular for such a widespread syntactic configuration as [6]. 9  In English some items, like ought, are always auxiliaries; Portuguese auxiliaries all have other functions. 8

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sentence [15] the verb ir ‘go’ is present, but the only valential conditions at work are those of vender ‘sell’; consequently, if we substitute vendeu ‘sold’, vende ‘sells’, and venderá ‘will sell’ for vai vender no change will be necessary in the complements; and the same thematic relations will be present in all these versions. The verb ir ‘go’, apart from occurring as an auxiliary, has a valency of itself, as in constructions of motion like [14], but in [15] there is no trace of the valency of ir; the complex auxiliary+main verb functions as a unit, with the valency totally determined by the main verb. And, since verbs like ir can occur as auxiliaries or as main verbs, it becomes clear that these are functions: calling ir an auxiliary is, strictly speaking, incorrect: it is a verb that has the function auxiliary in its valency. The list of verbs that can occur in auxiliary function is not long, and is given in full in grammars; they can be put together into a class, if the class is defined in loose terms, that is, by using only the feature Aux. But, looking more closely at the data, we see that there are several syntactic auxiliary functions, each determining a separate class of verbs. The facts are well known, and do not need to be detailed here: it is enough to remember that there are three auxiliary functions, differing as to syntax and semantics:    Auxiliary ir ‘go’ + infinitive: [16] Meu tio vai vender a fazenda.     ‘my uncle is going to sell his farm’    Auxiliary ter ‘have’ + verbal participle:10 [17] O Daniel tem trabalhado muito.     ‘Daniel has been working a lot’    Auxiliary estar ‘be’ + gerund: [18] Está chovendo.    ‘it is raining’  Not just “participle”. Portuguese has two participles, the verbal and the nominal one; the former occurs with auxiliaries, the latter patterns somewhat like an adjective; see Perini (2013, 2015, Appendix 6). 10

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We have then three “auxiliary” features: ir is marked [+Aux-infinitive]; ter is [+Aux-verbal participle]; and estar is [+Aux-gerund]. The classes thus established vary in size: [+Aux-gerund] is a feature not only of estar but also of andar, vir, acabar ‘end up’, and several others.11 This division corresponds to semantic features: a sequence of auxiliary plus infinitive expresses future tense, with a verbal participle it expresses perfect aspect, and with a gerund a continuous event.

8.2.3 Light Verbs Also well known are light-verb constructions, as for instance [19] Eu dava um passeio toda manhã.     I gave a walk every morning    ‘I took a walk every morning’

Rigorously speaking, a verb like dar is not to be classified as a “light verb”; rather, it is a verb that can appear in a light construction,12 since it also occurs in other constructions, where it is not “light” at all: [20] Eu dei aquele livro para minha irmã.      ‘I gave that book to my sister’

That is, instead of having “light” as part of its definition, a verb like dar has occurrence in light constructions as part of its functional potential (i.e., its valency). Terminology apart, it is clear that some verbs can appear in these constructions, and some cannot; therefore, we have here another feature with which to subclassify verbs, namely [±Light], meaning the potentiality that the item appear in a light construction. In Portuguese the most common of these verbs is dar, which in its nonlight use means ‘give’. Other verbs marked [+Light] are fazer, sofrer, and levar.13 They  See a complete list, and an excellent study, in Pontes (1973).  Not a very good designation, since the construction itself is not light, but it will do for the moment. 13  A basic text on light constructions in Portuguese is Scher (2003); I develop her ideas in Perini (2015, section 6.5). 11 12

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have the property of occurring in light constructions, and several semantic characteristics, summarized as Light verb […] A verb with little or no semantic content of its own which combines with a (usually indefinite) direct object noun or NP which itself expresses a verbal meaning. [Trask 1992, p. 160]

Actually, things are more complex; see Perini (2015, section 6.5) for details. Here we are concerned with the way these verbs are classified, as against nonlight verbs. Besides being marked as [+Light], they are also distinguished according to the thematic relations they assign to the subject. Thus, two of the four verbs mentioned, dar and fazer, assign the role Agent to their subjects, and two, sofrer and levar, both translated as ‘undergo’, assign the role Patient; compare the role of the subject in these sentences: [21] O juiz deu uma olhada nos documentos.    the judge gave a look at the documents       ‘the judge took a look at the documents’ [22] O juiz sofreu uma cirurgia.     ‘the judge underwent a surgery’

The object NP, which denotes the event, has its Agent expressed by the subject in [21], and its Patient expressed by the subject in [22]. This provides a feature that subclassifies light verbs according to the semantic role of their subjects. Summarizing, it can be said that verbs are subclassified according to their valential behavior by several criteria, among which: the diatheses in which each can occur; whether or not it can occur in the auxiliary function; the form of the main verb that appears with the auxiliary (gerund, verbal participle, infinitive); whether they appear in light constructions; and, among the latter, which semantic role each verb assigns to its subject. All of these criteria are valential. Complexity, of course, does not stop there; and in the next chapter we will consider other factors involved in the subclassification of verbs by valency.

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References Borba, Francisco da Silva.1990. Dicionário gramatical de verbos do português contemporâneo do Brasil [Grammatical dictionary of verbs of contemporary Brazilian Portuguese]. São Paulo: Ed. UNESP. Cançado, Márcia, Luísa Godoy, and Luana Amaral. 2013. Catálogo de verbos do português brasileiro [Catalogue of verbs of Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG. Carvalho, Janayna M.R. 2012. Valência dos verbos de conhecimento do português brasileiro [Valency of verbs of knowledge in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: M.A. dissertation, UFMG. Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations—A preliminary investigation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Perini, Mário A. 2013. Os dois particípios e a análise das passivas no português brasileiro [The two participles and the analysis of passives in Brazilian Portuguese]. In A gramática da oração: diferentes olhares [Grammar of the clause: Several views], ed. Maria Angélica F.  Cunha, 68–84. Natal, RN: EDUFRN. ———. 2015. Describing verb valency: Practical and theoretical issues. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Pontes, Eunice. 1973. Verbos auxiliares em português [Auxiliary verbs in Portuguese]. Petrópolis: Vozes. Scher, Ana Paula. 2003. Quais são as propriedades lexicais de uma construção com verbo leve? [What are the lexical properties of a light-verb construction?] In Semântica formal [Formal semantics], ed. Ana Lúcia Müller, Esmeralda V. Negrão, and Maria José Foltran. São Paulo: Ed. Contexto. Trask, R.L. 1992. A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. London: Routledge.

9 Constructions of Directional Motion: A Guided Tour of Valential Complexity

9.1 Directional Motion In this chapter I examine a group of verbs which, although they show some semantic similarity to each other, are different as to details of their valency. This may be taken as an example of the incidence of idiosyncrasy in language structure, something I have been stressing repeatedly in this book. The group in question includes verbs that can express directional motion, occurring in constructions with (a) the direction of motion represented in the meaning of the verb, independently of the presence of locative complements; and (b) a subject Mover. They are called “verbs of inherently directed motion” by Levin (1993), who defines them as verbs whose meaning includes a specification of the direction of motion, even in the absence of an overt directional complement. (Levin, 1993, p. 264)

Thus, chegar ‘arrive’ is a verb of directional motion (VDM) because it denotes a motion ending at a particular location, and its subject (in the relevant construction) is the Mover:

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[1] Luzia chegou a Salvador/de Salvador.     ‘Luzia arrived to Salvador/from Salvador’

When the complement is with de it denotes the point of origin of the verb, but nonetheless the sentence refers to the end of the motion, that is, the time of arriving. Chegar is thus distinct from a verb like viajar ‘travel’, which also denotes motion, but in no specific direction.1 The directionality of chegar appears even when no Goal, Source, or Path is expressed, as in [2] Luzia está chegando.    ‘Luzia is arriving’

This contrasts with [3] Luzia está viajando.    ‘Luzia is traveling’

where all that is asserted is that she is in motion, without any intimation about the Goal, or the Source, of the motion. Chegar also differs from trazer ‘bring’, which is also a VDM (or, perhaps more precisely, a verb of caused directional motion)2 but with an object Mover: [4] Luzia trouxe o violão.     ‘Luzia brought the guitar’

Some of the VDMs studied in this chapter can also occur in constructions involving motion, with the Mover not being the subject (i.e., they occur in constructions of caused directional motion): [5] Cheguei a mesa para perto da janela.     ‘I brought the table near the window’  One can say, equivalently, that chegar ‘arrive’ profiles the end point of the motion, whereas viajar ‘travel’ refers merely to some kind of motion. 2  Levin (1993, p. 135) notes that bring and take “have been considered the ‘causative’ counterparts of come and go”. 1

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These examples are not considered in this chapter; they will have to be integrated into the description at a later moment. Here I am concerned with the expression of the semantic role Source and Goal, aiming for a complete description as far as our verbs are concerned. The verb chegar ‘arrive’ can also appear in constructions where no motion is asserted, as in [6] Um quilo de farinha chega para esses biscoitos.     ‘one kilo of flour is enough for these cookies’ [7] O cabelo dela chegava até a cintura.     ‘her hair reached her waist’

These uses are disregarded in the present chapter. But the fact that it can occur in constructions of motion means that chegar is a VDM. Consequently, “verb of motion” is to some extent a misnomer: what is “of motion” is the construction. But for our present purposes I keep referring to “verbs of directional motion”, defined as above. Verbs of directional motion are compatible with semantic roles like Goal, Source, and Path, and frequently diverge greatly among them as to the way these roles are syntactically coded. A final note on the use of ‘Goal’ and ‘Source’: these terms have been used for nonspatial relations; thus, the final prepositional phrase in I gave my hat to the girl is sometimes analyzed as having the semantic role Goal. Here I only consider these two roles in their strictly spatial senses, associated in all cases with the notion of physical motion.

9.2 A Sample of Verbs Some work has been done in recent years on the semantics of prepositions—in particular, on the semantic roles they can signal (e.g., O’Dowd 1998; Tyler and Evans 2003; and the articles in Zelinsky-Wibbelt 1993). But some aspects have been largely neglected, in particular the selectional properties of verbs with respect to the prepositions that introduce their complements; this has been the province of traditional grammars and dictionaries, approached in a somewhat informal way, without an attempt at generalization. In this chapter I try to establish some principles to

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guide a complete survey of verbs of directional motion in Portuguese in what respects their selection of prepositions signaling complements of Source and Goal. This a pilot study, to be eventually enlarged to cover the whole set of these verbs in the language. Among the verbs that answer to the definition of VDM are: abandonar ‘leave’; afastar ‘move away’; alcançar ‘reach’; aproximar ‘come near’; avançar ‘go forward’; cair ‘fall’; chegar ‘arrive’; deixar ‘leave’; descer ‘go down’; dobrar ‘turn’; entrar ‘come in’; escapar ‘escape’; fugir ‘run away’; ir ‘go’; partir ‘leave’; proceder ‘come from’; recuar ‘back up’; sair ‘go out’; subir ‘go up’; vir ‘come’; voltar ‘return’

There are others, but for the moment let us take just these 21, which will constitute our universe of analysis.3

9.3 Coding the Source Besides the Mover, VDMs can occur with Source and Goal complements.4 We start with sentences where only one of these roles occurs; the Source and the Goal can appear side by side, but in different patterns, to be studied in Sect. 9.5. The Source is most often marked by the prototypical preposition de ‘from’; but some verbs code the Source as an object (i.e., a nonsubject NP), and some cannot appear with an expressed Source5: [8] O público se afastou do estádio. (*ao estádio/*o estádio)     ‘the public moved away from the stadium’ [9] Carla escapou do encontro.     ‘Carla escaped from the meeting’  Seventeen of them figure among the 1500 most frequent words of the language, according to Davies and Preto-Bay (2008); the remaining four were included because they illustrate additional idiosyncrasies in preposition selection. 4  Also with Path, not studied here. 5  Some Portuguese prepositions agglutinate with articles and other items: de + o = do, and so on. For a complete list of the agglutinations used in this text, I refer to Appendix B. 3

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[10] O público abandonou o estádio. (*do estádio/*ao estádio)     ‘the public left the stadium’ [11] * Carla entrou da cozinha. (no Source allowed)     ‘Carla came in from the kitchen’

As seen, with afastar ‘move away’ and escapar ‘escape’ the Source can be coded only as de NP, and with abandonar ‘leave’ only as the object NP. The behavior of each of our 21 verbs with respect of the expression of the Source can be summarized as: –– abandonar, deixar express their Source only as the object, that is, an NP without preposition; –– afastar, cair, chegar, descer, escapar, fugir, partir, proceder, recuar, sair, subir, vir, voltar express their Source only as a complement with de; –– alcançar, aproximar, avançar, dobrar, entrar, ir do not allow expression of the Source alone—only, as will be seen in 9.5, when there is also an expressed Goal. Escapar and fugir occur with a complement introduced by a, but in this case the meaning is not spatial. Thus, [12] Carla escapou/fugiu ao encontro.     ‘Carla escaped the meeting’

only means that Carla avoided the duty to attend the meeting, without an assertion about her motion to or from some location. This is confirmed by the unacceptability of [13] * Carla escapou ao quintal.     ‘Carla escaped from the backyard’

Our set of VDMs then fall into three subclasses, according to the way each of them expresses (or fails to express) the Source: verbs that code the Source as de NP (afastar, cair, chegar, descer, partir, proceder, recuar, sair, subir, vir, voltar); verbs that code it as an object (abandonar, deixar); and

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verbs that do not allow the expression of the Source alone6 (alcançar, aproximar, avançar, dobrar, entrar, ir). The impossibility of expressing the Source with some verbs does not derive from their semantics, or from features of world knowledge: whoever “comes in”, does so into some place, coming from some other place; yet a verb like entrar does not allow the expression of the Source alone. This is then an idiosyncratic feature of this particular verb, and must appear in its valency.

9.4 Coding the Goal The facts relating to the expression of the Source are relatively simple, as compared with the complexity of the ways to code the Goal. There are three main prepositions marking the Goal in Brazilian Portuguese: para, a, and em. Each of them has its features: para is in very general use, with a as a more formal alternative; em as a mark of Goal is normally used in the spoken language7: [14] A professora foi para a praça.     ‘the teacher went to the square’ [15] A professora foi à praça.    ‘id.’ [16] A professora foi na praça.    ‘id.’

At first sight, then, the facts seem simple: the valency of the verb, here ir ‘go’, admits of all three prepositions.8 But as soon as we try to apply the  There are ways to express the Source, but not simply with a complement to the verb; for instance, the meaning of [11] can be expressed as Carla entrou vindo da cozinha ‘C. entered coming from the kitchen’. 7  The use of em in this context is considered incorrect by traditional grammars; here, as elsewhere, people pay no attention to the prohibition. 8  There are a few items, traditionally analyzed as adverbs, that express the Goal without a preposition: lá ‘there’, aqui ‘here’, and a few others. These words can express the Location or the Goal, but not the Source; cf. English I went to Chicago versus I went there. 6

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rule to other verbs, complexity begins to appear. For instance, with fugir ‘run away’ there is no choice of preposition to express the Source: here only para is acceptable: [17] A professora fugiu para a praça.     ‘the teacher fled to the square’ [18] * A professora fugiu à praça. (with à praça = Goal) [19] * A professora fugiu na praça. (with na praça = Goal)

This means that no general rule (that is, a single diathesis) can account for the facts, and individual verbs must be described separately; in other words, here we have a typical valential phenomenon. According to what was seen so far we have two subclasses of verbs, in what respects their requirement of a preposition for the expression of the Goal: ir ‘go’ can express this role with para, a, and em, while fugir ‘run away’ can only take para. In order to appraise more precisely the extension of these differences, let us examine the way each of the 21 verbs in our list code the Goal. Of these, there are five, ir, vir, sair, subir, and voltar, which pattern like ir, that is, the expression of the Goal can be marked by any of the prepositions para, a, and em. But several others show a different pattern; as a matter of fact, these 21 verbs must be put into nine different subclasses, according to their behavior relating to the expression of the Goal. Some verbs also express the Goal with an object, without preposition: [20] Os alpinistas alcançaram o pico.     ‘the alpinists reached the summit’

These facts are summarized in Table 9.1. The table is not complete; we must add some details, among which (a) with cair, the Goal can be expressed with para, but only with a restricted set of complements: one can say caiu para a direita ‘fell to the right’, but not *caiu para a cama ‘fell on the bed’—here only em is acceptable: caiu na cama; and, as seen in the table,

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Table 9.1  Expression of the goal with 21 Verbs Goal: Verb

para

a

em

de

Obj

abandonar ‘leave’ afastar ‘move away’ alcançar ‘reach’ aproximar ‘come close’ avançar ‘go forward’ cair ‘fall’ chegar ‘arrive’ deixar ‘leave’ descer ‘go down’ dobrar ‘turn’ entrar ‘come in’ escapar ‘escape’ fugir ‘run away’ ir ‘go’a partir ‘leave’ proceder ‘come from’ recuar ‘back up’ sair ‘go out’ subir ‘go up’ vir ‘come’ voltar ‘return’

− + − − + − − − + + + + + + + − + + + + +

− − − − − − + − + − − − − + − − (−) + + + +

− − − − − + + − − − + − − + − − − + + + +

− − − + − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − −

− − + − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − −

Recuar ‘back up’ accepts a, according to Fernandes (1940). But his examples are from written texts, mostly from the nineteenth century; nowadays this verb is little used with a Goal, and it is difficult to ascertain the acceptability of recuar a NP. a Ir accepts the expression of the Source when used with a reflexive, meaning “leave”: a moça se foi da cidade ‘the girl left the town’; this is more typical of the written language (I owe this observation to Danilo Furtado)

(b) abandonar, deixar, and proceder do not allow the expression of the Goal; and (c) aproximar is the only known verb that takes a complement with de to denote the Goal; everywhere else de is a prototypical marker of Source. These details bring in additional skewness into the picture.

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9.5 Constructions with Source and Goal Sections 9.3 and 9.4 describe the possibilities of coding the Source and the Goal with these verbs (as long as the Mover is the subject), but only in structures with just one locative complement: Source or Goal. We must still examine cases where both the Source and the Goal appear, as in [21] A encomenda veio de Belém para Belo Horizonte.      ‘the packet came from Belém to Belo Horizonte’     Mover    Source     Goal

At first sight, it seems that the analysis of these sentences is already done: the Source and the Goal are added according to the rules summarized in the preceding sections. But, surprisingly, this does not work in all cases. For instance: ir ‘go’ admits of a Goal with para, a ou em; it does not occur with a Source only: [22] * O cachorro foi da cozinha.      ‘the dog went from the kitchen’

But ir can occur with a Source if the sentence also contains a Goal: [23] O cachorro foi da cozinha para o quintal.     ‘the dog went from the kitchen to the backyard’

The facts are pretty complex, and are summarized in Table 9.2, which combines the data relating to Source alone and Goal alone plus the ones relating to sentences with Source and Goal:

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Table 9.2  Expression of source, goal, and source + goal with 21 verbs Verb

Only source

Only goal

Source and goal Source

abandonar afastar alcançar aproximar avançar cair chegar deixar descer dobrar entrar escapar fugir ir partir proceder recuar sair subir vir voltar

Goal

de

Obj

para

a

em

de

Obj

de

Obj

para a

em

− + − − − + + − + − − + + − + + + + + + +

+ − − − − − − + − − − − − − − − − − − − −

− + − − + − − − + + + + + + + − + + + + +

− − − − − − + − + − − − − + − − (−) + + + +

− − − − − + + − (+) − + − − + − − − + + + +

− − − + − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − −

− − + − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − −

− + − − + + − − + + + + + + + − + + + + +

− − − − − − − + − − − − − − − − − − − − −

− + − − + + − + + + + + + + + − + + + + +

− − − − − + − − (−) − (+) − − − − − − (+) + (−) +

− − − − + (+) − − + (+) (+) − − + − − (−) (+) + + +

Parentheses indicate uncertain judgments, to be verified; I have recorded my own tendencies

9.6 On the Classification of Verbs We can now attempt a general classification of these 21 verbs, with the following result9:

 In the classification, I have disregarded the parentheses that indicate uncertain judgments. The table must be perfected with further research, including testing of the sentences with a set of speakers. In the list of subclasses, ‘/’ refers to the boxes in Table 9.2. 9

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9.6.1 Subclasses A (- + / - - - - - / - - / - - -) abandonar B (+ - / + - - - - / + - / + - -) afastar, escapar, fugir, partir, recuar C (- - / - - - - + / - - / - - -) alcançar D (- - / - - - + - / - - / - - -) aproximar E (- - / + - - - - / + - / + + -) avançar, dobrar F (+ - / - - + - - / + - / + + +) cair G (+ - / - + + - - / - - / - - -) chegar H (- + / - - - - - / - + / + - -) deixar I (+ - / + + + - - / + - / + + -) descer, vir, voltar J (- - / + - + - - / + - / + + +) entrar K (- - / + + + - - / + - / + + -) ir L (+ - / - - - - - / - - / - - -) proceder M (+ - / + + + - - / + - / + + +) sair, subir

We have now, for our 21 verbs, no less than 13 classes—about 1.6 verbs per class, which closely agrees with Gross’s results, already quoted in Sect. 4.3.1, namely that his set of 3000 verbs were distributed among 2000 classes: Since a class contains an average of 1.5 verbs, it can be concluded that, in general, there are no two verbs having the same syntactic properties. (Gross, 1975, p. 214)

Our results are, let us make it clear, less definite than Gross’s, since we have only classified 21 verbs (less than 1% of all verbs in the language). But from this summary survey one can already see how complex the phenomenon is, and how great is the need for studies in sufficient width. None of these features can be dispensed with—each of them describes a relevant aspect of the grammatical behavior of the verb, an aspect that must be known by the language user if she is to produce correct sentences, and correctly interpret those she hears—for instance, although de is a prototypical mark of Source, with aproximar it marks the Goal; and this must be known by all users. We are not, then, dealing with petty details, but with information that is essential for the use of the language: in other words, the description cannot make do with less than 13 classes

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for these 21 verbs. This may look like a desperate situation: how can one learn new verbs with any efficiency, if prediction is so poor? A solution to this dilemma was already suggested in Sect. 4.5.5, but since it is important I repeat it here: when learning a new verb we do not look for the class it belongs to; rather, we learn the functional features one by one. For instance, if one hears a sentence containing alcançar he must learn that this verb codes the Goal as its object: os alpinistas alcançaram o pico ‘the alpinists reached the summit’. Expectations are possible, because as seen in the table the number of features is limited: only 12 for these verbs, and this set generalizes for verbs of motion in general. It is therefore possible to build expectations and check them against the data. This is in harmony with the general use of classes in a language: the units to be learned and used are not classes per se, but rather the individual features that together classify each item. This is a general principle, applying in all areas of the grammar—I remind the reader of the phonology example given in Sect. 5.3. What is a word class, after all? As we saw, there is a way to classify a word like cat in absolute terms: it is enough to consider all of its features, and in this case it will belong to a well-defined class together with the (comparatively few) words that have the same features. But this class in itself will not be grammatically relevant, because no rule selects all features of the items it applies to. The class is interesting only to the extent that it includes all features that can, potentially, be used by some grammatical rule. Words are stored in long-term memory along with a list of features; but the grammatical interest of this list is only potential. Grammatical rules and processes seem to be blind to the whole complex of features associated with each lexical item; instead, they are sensitive to selected portions thereof, and since these portions vary from rule to rule, learning a lexical item means learning the whole list of its features that may eventually be the object of a rule. It is as if each rule defined its own classes, and these rule-specific classes are what is really relevant for grammatical description.10 Now coming to our examples: the rules responsible for coding the Source must take into account only the part of the table which refers to  This is an application of Schlesinger’s (1995, pp. 25–26) Principle of Linguistic Relevance.

10

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this role: if the verb is subir ‘go up’ the Source is a prepositional phrase with de; if it is abandonar ‘leave’ it is the object. The rest of the table is irrelevant for the coding of this particular role. Here again, as we see, the basic unit of analysis is the classificatory feature, not the class itself. The system does not, of course, exclude the possibility of shortcuts: it may be that all items marked ‘A’ are necessarily (or prototypically) marked ‘B’. This goes beyond the aims of the present discussion, but of course must be researched.

9.7 Searching for Regularity 9.7.1 Regular Matrixes The picture that begins to appear, still very vaguely, in our table suggests the possibility of some structure. For example, subclass B seems to be valid for a particularly large number of verbs (5 out of 21); and, perhaps significantly, it is one of the subclasses where no difference appears in the possible expression of the Source and the Goal whether or not they appear together in the same sentence. Contrast this situation with subclass J (one verb), where the verb does not allow the expression of the Source alone, and the Goal is coded by para or em, but not a; but in sentences with the two complements, the Source can be expressed (by de), and the Goal admits of a, besides para and em.11 We can then distinguish two kinds of verbs: those that behave as might be expected, with Source & Goal being the sum of Source plus Goal, and those that do not. This further subclassifies our subclasses into “well-­ behaved” and “rebellious” ones. In our table, only subclasses B and M are well-behaved; all others are rebellious. But what is of some interest is the number of verbs in each: we find that 7 verbs belong to 2 well-behaved subclasses, and 14 verbs to 11 rebellious ones. It might be interesting to check this distribution with a more representative set of verbs; who knows, we may find that a significantly larger number belong to  As said, I have some doubts, in this case in particular about the acceptability of a: a matter for future research. 11

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well-­behaved subclasses—which would, if true, allow us to label these as “regular”, the other cases being exceptions. After all, with the exception of subclass I, rebellious subclasses tend to be the ones that include a smaller number of verbs. All this, of course, is speculation at present; but it may be taken as a suggestion for future research.

9.7.2 Regularity in Role Coding Another possible regularity is the way a role is coded. The most evident in the table is that the Source, when present, is expressed by de: 13 cases in 15; that is, there is little doubt that the expression of the Source as an object (with abandonar and deixar) is an exception. Furthermore, we may add four verbs that allow de as a mark of the Source, but only when the Goal is also present—that is, these four verbs also fall under the general rule as far as the coding of Source and Goal is concerned (they are exceptional in not allowing the Source alone). As for the Goal, the preferred preposition is clearly para: it can occur with 14 verbs, as against 4 that do not allow this preposition. The preposition a is accepted by 6 verbs, em by 9, and de by just one.12 Here, perhaps with a little less assurance, we may say that para is the regular (prototypical) way to code the Goal. This is confirmed by the context with Source and Goal: all verbs that accept the expression of Source plus Goal accept para as the mark for Goal; some also accept em, some do not—but no verb in this group fails to accept para for Goal. Here again, our data are too exiguous to grant conclusions; but suitable research can confirm (or disconfirm) these hypotheses, perhaps leading to the definition of the prototypical way in which these two roles receive their syntactic coding in the language. It may be instructive to check the way these roles are coded with verbs of nondirectional motion, like viajar ‘travel’. With this particular verb, the Source is always de, and the Goal can be para, a but not em:

 I know of only two verbs that code de Goal with de: aproximar ‘come near’ and the comparatively rare avizinhar ‘id.’ 12

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9  Constructions of Directional Motion: A Guided Tour…  Table 9.3  Expression of source, goal, and source+goal with viajar ‘travel’ Only source viajar

Source and goal in the S Only goal

Source

Goal

de

Obj

para

a

em

de

Obj

de

Obj

para

a

em

−

−

+

+

−

−

−

+

−

+

+

−

[24] Meu pai viajou para a Sibéria /à Sibéria/*na Sibéria     ‘my father traveled to Siberia’ [25] Meu pai viajou do Alasca para a Sibéria /à Sibéria/*na Sibéria     ‘my father traveled from Alaska to Siberia’13

With viajar, as with ir ‘go’, the Source cannot be expressed alone: [26] * Meu pai viajou do Alasca.     ‘my father traveled from Alaska’

The behavior of viajar can be described as in Table 9.3. This does not exactly correspond to any of the 13 subclasses already seen; therefore, viajar will have to be analyzed as belonging to yet another subclass.

9.8 Source and Goal in Nonverbal Environments It is known that Source and Goal complements also occur in connection with nominals: [27] A chegada de Pedro ao Brasil     ‘Pedro’s arrival to Brazil’ [28] A chegada de Pedro de Portugal     ‘Pedro’s arrival from Portugal’

13

 In these sentences em denotes Location, not Goal: ‘my father traveled in Siberia’.

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In these examples both the Source and the Goal are marked with the same prepositions that occur with the cognate verb, chegar ‘arrive’; the Mover, on the other hand, appears with de, instead of the subject that occurs with the verb. This seems to be the most frequent case. In some cases, however, Source and Goal pattern differently according to the verbal or nominal features of its head: [29] a. Pedro veio a/para/em São Paulo.      ‘Pedro came to São Paulo’     b. A vinda de Pedro a/para/*em São Paulo      ‘Pedro’s coming to São Paulo’ [30] a. Esse deputado se aproximou *ao governo/do governo.      ‘this congressman came closer to the government’     b. Esse deputado é próximo ao governo/do governo      ‘this congressman is close to the government’

Cases like these are not too rare, and are in need of specific research.14

9.9 Anomaly 9.9.1 Importance of the Anomalistic Component There is a tendency in modern linguistics to set idiosyncrasy apart as a marginal and comparatively unimportant phenomenon. For instance, Chomsky said in an interview that […] the dictionaries, grammars and so on should be understood as just collections of idiosyncratic hints. In fact, they’re almost complementary to the scientific study of language, because they’re dealing with idiosyncrasies which can’t be predicted from the nature of language. […] They’re lists of idiosyncrasies; it’s what Bloomfield called a ‘list of exceptions’. (Noam Chomsky, apud Andor 2004, p. 104)  For a somewhat outdated form of the written language, there is a dictionary of noun and adjective valency (Fernandes 1950) which may be a starting point for research. 14

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This seems to suggest that using a language is essentially handling general (or even universal) rules, which are at best complemented by exceptions and particular cases. Our data suggest otherwise: as far as the analysis of our admittedly small sample is concerned, idiosyncrasy seems to be an important factor in the structure of language—and this in important areas of language structure, such as valency, preposition selection, and word classification, where the learning of individual items is necessarily involved. Verb valency is prominent among these areas, not least because it has been more widely researched. In a partial survey of Portuguese verbs (comprising, to date, about 650 entries), 327 distinct diatheses have been found.15 That is, instead of the short list of possible transitivities found in traditional grammar (intransitive, direct transitive, copulative etc.) we have a few hundred different ways in which a verb can be inserted into a sentence. One interesting example is a number of diatheses that appear in the valencies of only one, or very few, verbs; examples are as listed16: [31] Camilo apanhou da mulher. (VSubj + V + de NP)   Patient      Agent       ‘Camilo took a beating from his wife’ (one verb, apanhar ‘take a beating’) [32] Esse armário cheira a mofo. (VSubj + V + a NP)      Stimulus       Manner       ‘this wardrobe smells of mold’ (two verbs, cheirar ‘smell’ and feder ‘stink’) [33] O governo fez do país um chiqueiro. (VSubj + V + de NP + NP)    Agent   Patient     Quality       ‘the government made a pigsty of this country’ (one verb, fazer ‘make’)

 This figure ignores the possibility of simplification as exemplified in Sect. 8.2.  The semantic roles are provisional, and basically follow the Valency Dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese Verbs, in its current version (November, 2020). 15 16

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[34] A multidão deixou o estádio. (VSubj + V + NP)    Mover        Source       ‘the crowd left the stadium’ (three verbs, abandonar, deixar, largar, all ‘leave’)

This contrasts with diatheses like [35] A menina comeu o bolinho. (VSubj + V + NP)       Agent     Patient     ‘the girl ate the cookie’

which occurs in the valencies of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of verbs.17 Other areas of language show an equally high incidence of idiosyncrasy. For instance, idioms, another phenomenon sometimes believed to be marginal, are extremely numerous, and in very frequent use, as shown by the recent work of Lúcia Fulgêncio (Fulgêncio 2008; in elab.). In a list of all idioms of spoken Brazilian Portuguese, she found over 9000 items, known and currently used by all speakers.18 As idioms cannot by definition be reduced to general rules, this is a striking example of the importance of the need to learn individual items in order to use a language.

9.9.2 In Search of Semantic Generalizations Returning to our prepositions, a possible hypothesis would be that their occurrence is governed by the semantics of the preposition and/or the verb; but this is not supported by the data. There is a difference in meaning between para and a, both markers of Goal: para most often denotes a permanent relocation, where a always denotes a temporary one. Thus, the difference between [36] Meu pai veio para São Paulo.  [34] and [35] represent different diatheses because, although the syntax is the same, the semantic roles differ. 18  Fulgêncio explicitly excludes regional and archaic items. She also calls attention to the high incidence of idioms responsible for expressing grammatical relations and textual coherence. 17

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[37] Meu pai veio a São Paulo.

both translatable as ‘my father came to São Paulo’, is that [36] intimates that it was a permanent move (he came to live in SP), whereas [37] refers to a visit to the city. But this difference cannot account for the fact that descer ‘go down’ accepts both para and a as a mark of its Goal, entrar ‘come in’ accepts only para, and chegar ‘arrive’ accepts only a. The same seems to hold for the inherent meaning of the verbs. A striking example is the existence of synonymous verbs which make different demands as for the prepositions introducing their complements. An example is abandonar and deixar, which both mean ‘leave’, but only the latter admits the expression of both the Source and the Goal in the same sentence. For the moment, then, our diagnosis must be “after diligent search, no evidence of meaning conditioning found”. Digressing for a moment outside the field of VDMs, synonymous or near-synonymous verbs that make different demands of prepositions with their complements are quite common. For instance, roubar ‘rob’, ‘steal’, lesar ‘defraud’, and furtar ‘steal’ depict the same scene, with the same participants. Yet roubar occurs in two diatheses, namely: (a) with an object Patient (the stolen thing) and the Source (the victim) with de; (b) with an object Source and the Patient with em. [38] Roberto roubou um milhão do estado.    Agent       Mover     Source     ‘Roberto stole one million from the state’ [39] Roberto roubou o estado em um milhão.      Agent      Source     Mover     ‘Roberto robbed the state of one million’ Now, lesar occurs only in (b), and furtar only in (a): [40] Roberto lesou o estado em um milhão.     Agent       Source    Mover     ‘Roberto defrauded the state of one million’

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[41] Roberto furtou um milhão do estado.     Agent      Mover       Source     ‘Roberto stole one million from the state’

The following are therefore unacceptable: [42]* Roberto furtou o estado em um milhão. [43]* Roberto lesou um milhão do estado.

This seems to corroborate the hypothesis that preposition selection is largely independent of semantic factors, being in many cases governed by idiosyncratic features of the verb. On the other hand, it is only largely independent, not totally; there certainly is a connection between the meaning of a verb and its valency, if only in certain cases, and in probabilistic terms. Thus, the construction shown in [35] A menina comeu o bolinho. (VSubj + V + NP)       Agent       Patient     ‘the girl ate the cookie’

which is one of the most frequent in the language, prototypically appears in the valency of verbs denoting action involving an Agent and a Patient. But there are exceptions, such as the one exemplified in example [31]: a verb of action, with an Agent and a Patient, and yet the construction is not the one shown in [35]. Prepositions also have, as a rule, a preferred meaning. Thus, para and a both have in their semantic matrixes the possibility of denoting the Goal; but the restrictions observed with descer ‘go down’, entrar ‘enter’, and chegar ‘arrive’ cannot be derived from this semantic feature of the preposition. And de, a prototypical mark of the Source, occurs as introducer of the Goal with the verb aproximar ‘come close’. Here, as so often in language, we find an interweaving of rules and anomalies, resulting in a highly complex structure.

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9.10 Conclusions The relative importance of the regular and anomalous components in the structure of languages is a very ancient question, going back to Hellenistic times. This question will be eventually made clear only when sufficiently comprehensive surveys of the facts become available; no a priori solution is likely to provide an answer. Part of modern linguistics has assumed (without enough evidence) that anomalies are a minor part of language; and, to be fair, it must be recognized that extensive surveys, by themselves, are not sufficient to provide an answer, if they are not related to a theory that accommodates general rules as well. That both components exist, and are important, is evident enough; and they must be researched in relation to each other. Gross (1975) works with a great number of features, without a rigorous distinction between those that have a relevant role in grammatical structure and those that do not. To take an example, Gross (1975) distinguishes “human” and “non-human” nouns. That this is a fact is unquestionable; but one must also ask, is this distinction functional in the language? I would argue that it is not in Portuguese (neither in French, I suspect); instead, the feature “human” is derived from nongrammatical information, such as the internal meaning of words (boy vs. dog, table), and the differences in distribution can be derived from that. Lack of that distinction results in an undifferentiated description, where linguistic features mix with purely cognitive ones, so that one is not sure, at each step, whether it refers to a particular language or to a general system of world knowledge. Preposition selection with verbs of directional motion provides an example of purely linguistic classification. The results shown in the tables given earlier have to do with the Portuguese language: its lexical items (prepositions, verbs) and their selectional properties. The semantic roles involved (Source, Goal) are not merely notions descriptive of the world, but relations that have grammatical relevance in this particular language, unlike “animate”, or “wooden”, which describe the real world without a consistent correlate in the structure of Portuguese. Linguistic features can

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vary from language to language—for instance, the lexical items are different, and some languages do distinguish “human” and “nonhuman” by grammatical means. World knowledge features are universal: “wooden” refers to something that can be ascertained without any reference to a particular language.19 The research reported here concerns the structure of Portuguese, and cannot be automatically transferred to other languages. Our conclusions, therefore, refer to Portuguese, and often also to English. And one of these conclusions is that, in this area, the importance of the anomalistic component is evident. The amount of idiosyncrasy in preposition selection is very high and does not seem to derive from semantic factors: each verb makes its own selection of preposition in order to code Source and Goal complements; and this selection is also dependent on constructional factors such as the presence, or not, of both complements in the same sentence. There are some general rules, no doubt; but there is also a large amount of idiosyncratic information to be acquired and used. Each verb includes, as part of its grammatical personality, information about the prepositions it allows in order to express these roles; and, when we consider that there are more than 3000 verbs in everyday use in the language, this also tells us something about our capacity to acquire, assess, and handle great amounts of particularized information.

References Andor, József. 2004. The master and his performance: An interview with Noam Chomsky. Intercultural Pragmatics 1 (1): 93–111. Davies, Mark, and Ana Maria R.  Preto-Bay. 2008. Frequency dictionary of Portuguese. New York: Routledge. Demuth, Katherine A. 1988. Noun classes and agreement in Sesotho acquisition. In Agreement in natural language, ed. Michael Barlow and Charles A. Ferguson. Stanford: CSLI.  Grammatical relevance of semantic categories occurs in several languages, but it is not always consistently based on cognitive categories. This applies to the class system found in Bantu languages: while it was “semantically based historically […], psychological studies indicate that little of this old semantic system remains productive today” [Demuth 1988, p. 306]. 19

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Fernandes, Francisco. 1940. Dicionário de verbos e regimes [A dictionary of verb government]. Rio de Janeiro: Globo. ———. 1950. Dicionário de regimes de substantivos e adjetivos [A dictionary of noun and adjective government]. Rio de Janeiro: Globo. Fulgêncio, Lúcia. 2008. Expressões fixas e idiomatismos do português brasileiro [Fixed expressions and idioms in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: Doctoral thesis, PUC-Minas. Gross, Maurice. 1975. Méthodes en syntaxe [Methods in syntax]. Paris: Hermann. Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations—A preliminary investigation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. O’Dowd, Elizabeth. 1998. Prepositions and particles in English: A discourse-­ functional account. Oxford University Press. Schlesinger, Izchak M. 1995. Cognitive space and linguistic case: Semantic and syntactic categories in English. Cambridge University Press. Tyler, Andrea, and Vyvyan Evans. 2003. The semantics of English prepositions: Spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition. Cambridge University Press. Zelinsky-Wibbelt, Cornelia, ed. 1993. The semantic of prepositions: From mental processing to natural language. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

10 Functions and Classes in the NP

10.1 The Noun Phrase The noun phrase is a particularly important unit in sentence structure; it can have the function of subject, which governs verb agreement; it also appears as a nonsubject, with several thematic relations; and it occurs as the complement of a preposition, and participates in the several thematic relations introduced by the preposition. In itself, the NP has the exclusive semantic function of referring to things; that is, it is potentially referential. Strawson (1950) denies that reference is a property of linguistic units: ‘referring’ is not something an expression does, it is something that someone can use an expression to do. (Strawson 1950, p. 44)

But this does not really affect the semantic function of the NP as it is considered here: an NP is either a unit that can refer to a thing (pace Strawson), or a unit that can be used by someone in order to refer to a thing. It actually makes no difference for our purposes: some units have this property, some do not; and having it defines, semantically, the

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NP. There are units that cannot be used to refer: in Portuguese, se ‘if ’, chegamos ‘(we) have arrived’, porque ‘because’, sem dúvida ‘undoubtedly’, para você ler ‘for you to read’, and so on; put more simply, none of these units can be understood as naming a thing. They can, it is true, refer to the unit itself; for instance, one can say, in English, [1] If is a conjunction.

but here we do not have the conjunction if, but rather the name of the conjunction. It is possible to add a determiner: [2] This if is blotted.

whereas in its conjunctional use if does not admit of such an addition: [3] * This if you say the truth ….

This is metalinguistic discourse, which, as is known, tends to subvert normal classes. Syntactically, the NP exhibits a structure that varies a lot, but is always characteristic. Some are very simple rules: Whenever you find a determiner, an NP begins there. (Liberato 1997, p. 15)

In other cases identifying the limits of an NP depends on closure; thus, for instance, in [4] The food for the cat fell on the floor.

the sequence the cat can be part of a complement in the larger NP the food for the cat, or it can be the subject of a sentence (the cat fell on the floor); but only the first alternative is viable because otherwise we would have a sequence the food for, which cannot be integrated into a correct constituent—“correct” meaning one that is stipulated by the rules of the language. The fact is that it is usually easy to identify NPs in a sentence— so much the better, since they have a very important contribution in the construction of the cognitive representation.

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10.2 The NP Head 10.2.1 Why We Need an NP Head The NP is traditionally, and correctly, taken to contain a special function, the head, which determines certain semantic and syntactic properties of the construction. It is with reference to the head that the position of some other constituents is stated, for instance the position of modifiers: one speaks of preposed and postposed modifiers, which means modifiers occurring before and after the head, respectively. The head has also several other properties, which make it a sort of a center of gravity for the NP. For some, the head would be a purely syntactic function, definable in terms of form; according to this view, the syntactic component of the grammar marks one of the terms in the NP as the head, and certain grammatical processes are sensitive to this mark—like number agreement (that car vs. those cars), and gender agreement in Portuguese (aquele carro amarelo ‘that yellow car’, masculine, as against aquela bicicleta amarela ‘that yellow bike’), feminine. Taking a relatively long NP like [5] Todas aquelas pequenas garrafas de vinho     ‘all those small bottles of wine’

how can a language user know that the head here is garrafas ‘bottles’, and consequently that the NP refers to bottles, not, say, to wine? That users can do that without difficulty is evident, since [5] is not ambiguous as to what it refers to. We might try to define the head by its formal (morphosyntactic) properties. This does not work, but since it has been tried, I give below the arguments against this kind of definition.1 First, the head cannot be identified by its linear position in the phrase; in order to do this we would have to define the head as the constituent that occurs in a certain position counting from the beginning or the end  In the discussion at this point I fail to keep a rigorous distinction between competence and performance. I believe this dichotomy makes sense, but I insist that a description of competence not grounded on data from performance is unacceptable. 1

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of the NP. But an NP can begin, or end, with a variable number of nonhead constituents,2 which makes it impossible to define the head by its slot in the sequence; for instance, [6] [Vinho] é muito caro.   Head     ‘wine is very expensive’ [7] [Esse vinho] é muito caro. Head     ‘this wine is very expensive’ [8] [Esse excelente vinho] é muito caro.     Head     ‘this excellent wine is very expensive’

and [9] [Vinho branco] é muito caro.    Head     ‘white wine is very expensive’ [10] [Vinho branco espanhol] é muito caro.     Head     ‘Spanish white wine is very expensive’

and so on. The optionality of pre- and post-head elements makes the definition of the head as the nth constituent counting from the beginning or from the end of the construction impossible. This works very clearly for Portuguese; for English, it may have to be restricted somewhat, but I still believe it is a poor way to define the head of an NP. For one thing, English does admit of post-head modifiers, as in attorney general, all things American, the opera ‘Carmen’, a poem full of alliteration—we  The reader will notice that I am assuming the head as known; I refer here to the traditional identification of the head, which is correct, although the definitions that allow this identification are mostly mistaken. 2

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cannot then define the head as the last constituent, or even the last nonprepositional constituent, in the phrase.3 We know, of course, that in all of [6]–[10] the head is vinho ‘wine’, but this knowledge cannot derive from its position in the sequence. On the other hand, there are some formal markings that help, if only negatively, in the identification of the NP head. The most important is that prepositional phrases (and, in English, also genitive phrases) cannot contain the head; in [11] O palácio do rei

as well as in its English translation [12] The king’s palace

the head is the word referring to the palace. To be sure, there are a few exceptions, but these are limited in scope: they often contain an insulting word followed by a prepositional phrase with de, and the NP is to be understood as referring to the entity denoted by the NP contained in the prepositional phrase. Thus, in [13] Aquele idiota do vizinho    ‘that idiot of the neighbor’

the reference is to the neighbor. Yet, in these constructions both nominals are coreferent, so that if [13] is understood as referring to the idiot it makes no real difference, and perhaps these expressions are not exceptions after all. Other possible exceptions are in fact idioms, and it is known that idioms tend to escape rules in general; for instance, sem vergonha, literally ‘without shame’, means ‘shameless person’, and can appear as an NP head as if it were (and perhaps it is) just a nominal.4 Language users are able to identify the head without difficulty, as has already been noted:  The last two examples come from Huddleston (1984, p. 261).  Fulgêncio (2008) claims that idioms are lexical items, normally stored as units, just as individual words are; sem vergonha is one of the items listed in her forthcoming dictionary of Portuguese idioms. 3 4

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Linguists of divergent theoretical persuasions are in almost complete agreement as to what is the head and what is the non-head in a given construction. (Nichols 1986, p. 57)

This does not apply to linguists only; any language user, given an NP, can tell “what one is speaking about”: in my brother’s canvas shoe we speak about a shoe, not about my brother, or about canvas. This ability to identify the head is essential to comprehension, and is easily put to use by any speaker, which suggests that there is a reasonably safe criterion behind the analysis. Zwicky (1993) gives a useful list of properties of the head of a construction; some of them are open to question, but his proposal is a good starting point to search for a better definition. His position is thus explained: Application of Zwicky’s criteria to a range of common syntactic constructions suggests that headedness is distributed amongst the constituents of a phrase. (Fraser et al. 1993)

According to this position, it makes little sense to look for the head of a construction. In what concerns the NP, however, I would rather say that headedness, meaning those features that really work, are concentrated on a single constituent in the phrase. I now proceed to examine Zwicky’s formal criteria and check their adequacy for the particular case of the NP. The first criterion is that [w]ith respect to its internal syntax, the Head is the required element in a construction […] ‘required’ in the special sense that without this element the construct is elliptical. (Zwicky 1993, p. 297)

In other words, all nonelliptical NPs have a head. I have some doubts about that, and one reason is that obligatory or optional occurrence is not a straightforward syntactic condition. Bosque (1989) points out that so-­ called adjuncts can be obligatory, as in5  Bosque’s examples are in Spanish; I give English translations for convenience.

5

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[14] Churches in Scandinavian countries are made of wood. [15] * Churches in countries are made of wood.

and yet the head of the subject in [14] must be churches, not the equally obligatory constituent Scandinavian. Obligatory occurrence often obeys pragmatic conditions, as is the case with [14]–[15]. Another of the properties proposed by Zwicky for the construction head is that [w]ith specific reference to its external syntax, the Head is the determinant in a somewhat different sense: the distribution of the construct as a whole is predictable from properties of the Head […] so that the Head determines what is in effect the lexical subcategory of the construct as a whole. The Head as external representative, or ‘external determinant’, is the element in a construction that serves as the trigger or the target for external lexical subcategorization […] with respect to partners of the construct as a whole, and as the trigger for government or agreement. […] For external purposes […] very red tomatoes has a distribution predictable from the properties of tomatoes […]. (Zwicky 1993, p. 297)

and also With respect to both its internal and its external syntax, the Head is the syntactic category determinant. It determines the syntactic category of the construct as a whole […] while the category of the Dependent has no direct reflection in the category of the construct. (Zwicky 1993, p. 297)

I have doubts about the applicability of this criterion in the receptor’s situation, in which he must identify the head among the several components of the phrase. Take the NP [12] The king’s palace.

The problem is that king and palace belong to the same syntactic category: they have similar syntactic features. Then, how can we know which of these items determines the category of the NP? We know that palace must be the

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head, but this procedure fails to show this clearly.6 And, as will be seen below, palace does not have the same syntactic features as the whole NP. This property seems to be derived from the notion of endocentric construction, introduced by Bloomfield (1933, p. 194). The idea is that an endocentric phrase (say, an NP) would have a syntactic distribution identical to one of its constituents. Another derivation of this putative property seems to me to be the generative idea of the NP (or N-double bar) as the projection of a head N. To be fair, it must be said that Zwicky does not insist on identity of distribution; rather, he merely states that “the distribution of the construct as a whole is predictable from properties of the Head”, and this may be true. But it remains to be verified, with due formulation of the correspondence rules that derive the distribution of an NP (and other constituent classes) from the distributional potential of its head, and the objection given earlier is still valid. This way to define the NP head is widely accepted, explicitly or implicitly, by linguists working on the topic, and not always with the restrictions added by Zwicky. As one example among many, we have Company (1991), who defines the NP by its property to occur in the majority of the same contexts that the immediate constituent considered as the head; that is, the substantive head and the noun phrase are equivalent (N≡NP) because they have similar possibility to appear in more extensive phrases. (Company 1991, p. 13)

Company is aware that the equivalence is not perfect, and takes it as an acceptable approximation. But distributional equivalence of words like John, friend, book, and so on with the NPs which they head is largely fictional. According to the aforementioned definitions a phrase like Nadine’s book would have a similar distribution to its head, book. But the differences are striking: for one thing, book can occur as the head of an NP, and the whole NP obviously cannot; for another, the NP can be the complement of be, as in

 I refer to the procedure as applied alone; in [12] we know that king cannot be the head because it is in the genitive form. 6

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[16] That packet on my bed is Nadine’s book.

whereas just book does not occur there. A noun can appear as a vocative (friend, help me) but an NP cannot. Book can appear as a modifier, as in book cover, but that black book cannot. Even the assertion that both the head and the NP can be the subject of a sentence is incorrect, first because in many cases the head alone cannot appear in that function: [17] * Book is very boring.

And even when it can, as in [18] Martha called me.

one must ask whether the subject is the word Martha or the NP [Martha]NP , which sounds the same but patterns in a way parallel to larger units like my friend Martha and the like. If we insist that the word Martha is the subject in [18], we must deny that Martha is an NP in that sentence. But if we do so we must abandon the generalization that the subject function is always filled in by an NP: there will be exceptions, like Martha in [18]. Furthermore, the exception would be extended to the other functions of the NP, such as object and complement of preposition. According to this analysis, the subject, the object, and the complement of a preposition would be filled in sometimes by an NP, sometimes by a noun. I do not see what we have to gain from this analysis, and have to conclude that this criterion does not work. The head is also said to be the determinant of certain morphological categories: number, and in some languages gender and case. It is then possible to say that in [19] Esse bom vinho    ‘this good wine’

the NP as a whole is singular and, in Portuguese, also masculine, which is attributed to the inherent number and gender of vinho ‘wine’. This is

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probably true; but when we try to state the rules that yield this result, we find some difficulties: how do we know that it is not vinho ‘wine’ that agrees with esse ‘this’ or with bom ‘good’? There are good reasons to reject this alternative, but they have to do with meaning; in purely morphological terms, things are not so clear. One may argue that vinho has no feminine form, and therefore cannot agree. But here again there are problems: simples ‘simple’ also shows no gender and number variation, and in the phrase [20] Essa solução simples    ‘this simple solution’

we would have no evidence (as far as pure form is concerned) on which term agrees with which. That is, we might expect that in [20] finding the head would be more difficult than in [19], which goes against all intuition. Thus, while it is true that the head “serves […] as the trigger for government or agreement”,7 this fails to be of any help to the language user trying to make sense of the NP.

10.2.2 Towards a Definition8 The head is also […] the characterizing participant in a construction; intuitively, the meaning of a construct is a subtype of the meaning of the Head (red apple denotes a subtype of apple […]). (Zwicky 1993, p. 296)

This is the only basis for a working definition of the NP head that escapes the objections given earlier against purely formal definitions. Our definition of the NP head must take into account the semantic, ultimately cognitive, properties of the lexical items involved. Let us then see how this definition works.  Zwicky 1993, p. 297.  The analysis of the NP head here presented was first proposed in Perini et al. (1996).

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We come back here to our old friend the feature [R], which as we saw in Chap. 4 stands for “potentially referential”. Some words are marked [+R], that is, can be used referentially, and some are marked [–R], and do not have that property. This seems to be the essential factor in the process used by speakers in order to process NPs and find out what they refer to. First, let us remember that the NP has the property of referring to things.9 This is its main semantic feature, as seen in Sect. 10.1. And, furthermore, there is only one referential constituent per NP (and per reading, when more than one is available); this is what Zwicky (1993) calls the characterizing participant, and I prefer to call the reference center of the NP. The presence of a reference center is required because of the essential function of the NP, namely to identify a referent: additional information must adapt to this basic fact. The head supplies the reference center, upon which the rest of the NP elaborates the final reference: from “dog” we come then to “that small yellow dog in the backyard”. The meaning relation between the head and the NP is one of hyponymy: the NP expresses a hyponym of the head’s reference. This means that NPs are one of the resources a language uses in order to elaborate the information contained in an item; we have here another aspect of the elaboration process, which seemingly pervades much of the functioning of a natural language. The hyponymic relation between the NP and the head is usually recognized; we may refer to Zwicky’s quotation given earlier, where he refers to “subtypes”, that is, hyponyms; see also the phrase is a “kind of ” the head since the latter provides both the semantic and syntactic type of the phrase. (McGlashan 1993, p. 204)

and […] the composition of the NP is conditioned [by its] referential function. And […] the elements of the NP are added as they become necessary as adequate tips for the identification of the aimed referent. […] Each added element restricts the previously delimited class. (Liberato 1997, pp.  6–7; her italics)  “Thing” is a technical term, and includes persons, animals, and events (the Pigrims’ arrival) as well. For a more elaborate definition, see Langacker (1987, ch. 5); see also some discussion in Sect. 14.4.1. 9

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For instance, that small yellow dog has a more elaborate reference than dog.10 McGlashan’s assertion is correct, except for the mention of the syntactic type relation between the head and the NP, which as we saw earlier does not work. But the idea that the head is semantically a more schematic version of the NP is correct, and can become the basis for a working identification criterion. Take the following NP, [22] Esse excelente vinho branco     ‘this excellent white wine’

One of the words must be the head; and the head, as we know, is the reference center of the construction. This item will then have the feature [R], meaning that it is in effect referential, which in its turn entails that the head must be an item marked [+R], that is, must have referential potential. Two of the words present in [22] are then excluded, because they are not marked [+R]: esse ‘this’ and excelente ‘excellent’; neither can be understood as naming a thing, and both are then ineligible as an NP head. Their semantic function in the NP is the one mentioned by Liberato as “adequate tips for the identification of the aimed referent”—that is, they restrict the reference of the head; let us say that they have the feature [+Q], introduced in Sect. 4.5.1. But since they are [–R], they cannot be the head of an NP. Two words are left, vinho ‘wine’ and branco ‘white’, and the head must be one of them. Now, vinho is [+R, −Q]; and branco is [+R, +Q], because it can occur in phrases like [23] Vinho branco    ‘white wine’ [24] O branco     (i.e., the white color, as in o branco está na moda ‘white is in fashion’)

 Not necessarily more specific: elaborate reference may be generic, as in small yellow dogs are very friendly. 10

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This means that, in principle, either of these words might be the head. But there is another factor to consider: if the head is branco, we will end up with two heads, since vinho cannot be [Q]; and there are good reasons to believe that an NP cannot contain two separate references. Therefore, the head must be vinho, and branco will be a Q here, adding a quality that restricts the reference of vinho. Summarizing, we have the following possibilities: (a) (b) (c) (d)

vinho

branco

R Q R Q

R Q Q R

and only (c) is acceptable, because (a) has two heads, (b) has no head,11 and (d) has Q for vinho, but this word cannot have this feature. This may sound a little complicated at first, but it derives from semantic properties of the words involved. Translating the argument into everyday language: (a) means that the NP refers both to wine and to the white color; (b) does not refer to anything at all; and (d) requires vinho to express a quality, which it cannot do; as a result, these three possibilities are all ill-formed. Only (c) is well formed, since it refers to wine, and adds that it is white. All this depends on the fact that vinho ‘wine’ is the name of a thing, but is not a quality; and branco ‘white’ is both the name of a thing (a color) and a quality. As for double reference within one NP, it is possible, but must be marked with a connective: o vinho e a cerveja ‘the wine and the beer’; syntactically, this NP is made up of two coordinated NPs: [ [o vinho]NP e [a cerveja]NP ]NP. This is the only case in which an NP can have more than one referent, and as seen it is syntactically signaled.12

 And therefore no reference. But reference does not always depend on the presence of a head—in particular in case of sentential NP, like que vai chover ‘that it is going to rain’, where no head, in the sense here considered, is visible. I prefer to leave these cases aside for the moment (I thank Ana Paula Rabelo for this observation). 12  Of course, in two friends we have only one reference; the NP head is only one, although it refers to a plural entity. 11

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10.2.3 Ambiguity The aforementioned analysis has some testable corollaries. For instance, if both words have the features [+R] and [+Q], it predicts that ambiguity will arise. This happens with the sequence velho amigo: this NP has two possible interpretations, one in which the head is amigo, another in which it is velho; respectively, ‘old friend’, or ‘friendly old man’. This derives from computing the possibilities in (a) (b) (c) (d)

velho

amigo

R Q R Q

R Q Q R

There are two acceptable combinations: (c) and (d); (a) and (b) are unacceptable for the same reasons seen for vinho branco. Again, this derives from the semantics of the two words: velho can mean ‘old man’ (R) or ‘old’ (Q); amigo can mean ‘friend’ (R) or ‘friendly’ (Q). There are complications, however. In some cases the ambiguity does not arise, due to one of the items being marked [–PHMod];13 this was seen in Sect. 4.5.3, in connection with the NPs [25] Um velho palhaço    ‘an old clown’ or ‘a clownish old man’ [26] Um palhaço velho    ‘an old clown’, but not ‘a clownish old man’

Sentences like these show that velho and palhaço, although both marked [+R,+Q], are not identical, since only velho is [+PHMod]; therefore, these items do not belong exactly in the same class—a situation to be encountered very often, and which shows once again the precariousness of the traditional conception of class.

 That is, it cannot be a pre-head modifier.

13

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The analysis proposed earlier accounts in a pretty natural way for the ability speakers show of identifying the NP head with such ease—by the way, an essential ability, since it enables people to know what the NP refers to: an important step in interpreting the sentence, and ultimately constructing its cognitive representation.

10.2.4 On the Interplay of Syntax and Semantics The analysis proposed in the preceding section raises a problem: is the NP head a syntactic or a semantic function? We saw that it may be found within the NP by following a semantic procedure; yet it has morphosyntactic functions, being the constituent that governs number and gender agreement; and it also figures in the rule that stipulates that an item marked [–PHMod] cannot appear in pre-head position, apparently for purely syntactic reasons. The answer, I believe, is that the NP head is a semantic function—but it has an effect on syntactic phenomena such as the positioning of some constituents, and gender and number agreement. This certainly clashes with a model that has neatly defined syntactic and semantic components as separate and compact blocks of rules, and it is impossible in models like the standard generative theory; yet I think it fits pretty well with several other important details of the description. Among these is the fact that positioning of Q items before the head is, at least partially, governed by the semantic role of the item: a qualificative one can appear before the head, as um excelente relógio ‘an excellent watch’, uma prudente decisão ‘a prudent decision’; but a Q item that has proventive,14 agentive, or patientive role cannot appear preposed to the head: *um japonês relógio ‘a Japanese watch’ (OK: um relógio japonês), *uma presidencial decisão ‘a presidential decision’ (OK: uma decisão presidencial), *ambiental preservação ‘environmental preservation’ (OK: preservação ambiental). There are no exceptions to this rule, which illustrates the effect of semantic features on syntax: some semantically defined items cannot appear as pre-head modifiers. Another curious example is the word simples, which translates  A proventive item is one that denotes the (national or regional) source of its head: Australian sailor, Texan cuisine. 14

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as ‘simple’ or as ‘mere’: when in its (slightly pejorative) meaning ‘mere’, as in uma simples secretária ‘a mere secretary’, it must occur before the NP head: this is another example in which the semantics governs the conditions of occurrence of an item.15 Another possible example of semantic interference on syntax, outside the area of NP structure, is the ordering of NPs in sentences like [27] Daniela considera Ronaldo o maior jogador do mundo.     ‘Daniela considers Ronaldo the greatest player in the world’

We have here two nonsubject NPs, Ronaldo and o maior jogador do mundo; they are strictly ordered, so that the following is at least strange: [28] ?? Daniela considera o maior jogador do mundo Ronaldo.

[28] can perhaps be rescued by using intonation, that is, by pronouncing o maior jogador do mundo quickly and stressing Ronaldo. But even so, to me at least, the result is marginal; and [27] requires no such intonational contortions. Now, this phenomenon can be described in terms of semantic features: one of these two NPs is referential, and the other qualificative, and the order must be reference first, quality last; also, alternatively, we can use thematic relations, such as Qualified.thing—Quality. Either way, our point is demonstrated: the order in which these complements must occur (syntax) is describable in semantic terms, and only thus. There is no lack of examples: a nonsubject NP (an object, in the terminology used here) cannot have the role Agent—again, no exceptions; and, of course, each preposition has its list of possible semantic roles, excluding all others. All these statements are symbolic, and contribute to the drawing of the borderline between facts of form and facts of meaning—a most complex line, including curves, bends, and enclaves. Ultimately, we deal with the distinction between grammatical and cognitive knowledge.

 There are other items that behave in a similar way; one example is grande, which may be ‘large’ in any position, but ‘great’ only if in pre-head position. 15

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These facts are described here in concrete terms, according to the way they appear at first approach. A more abstract theoretical analysis is certainly possible, as for instance establishing that the NP construction has different interpretations available to modifiers according to their positions relative to the head; this may conceivably allow a separation of sorts between the components of the grammar. I will not pursue this possibility here; note, however, that each statement, taken separately, is always clearly identifiable as syntactic or semantic—the NP head is determined by semantic criteria, yet once this is done the position of a modifier is established syntactically. The distinction is kept, and the epithets “formal”, or “(morpho)syntactic”, and “semantic” are applicable to statements, not to components of the grammar. A disclaimer is in order at this point: this is not a theory, or part of a theory, but only an observation directly derived from descriptive work on some important areas of Portuguese (and to a certain extent English); it functions pretty well as a working hypothesis, and that is all. As I frequently insist, our knowledge of language is simply not ripe enough for the formulation of a comprehensive theory.

10.3 Other Functions in the NP 10.3.1 P  redeterminer, Determiner, Quantifier, and Modifier The NP, naturally, also contains other terms besides the head. Unlike the head, these functions can be defined positionally: once the NP head is identified, the remaining functions are defined by their linear position in the sequence, either in relation to the beginning of the NP or in relation to the head.16 In the phrase  It is not my intention to make an extensive survey of the internal structure of the Portuguese NP—I am interested, rather, in the ways of describing their positional functions; there is a lot to be researched in this area. 16

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[29] Todos esses livros novos     ‘all these new books’

some positional constraints are clear: todos ‘all’ holds the privilege of occurring in first place; esses ‘these’ appears in first place if there is no todos; and livros ‘books’, which is the head, comes after them. As for novos, let us call it a modifier (Mod), defined, for the moment, as any term occurring after the head. In this NP, no ordering transposition is allowed; we can then define four functions, three of them based on linear order: [30] Predeterminer—Determiner—NPHead—Modifier    todos    esses    livros   novos

Only one item in the language can have the function predeterminer (PDet), namely todo ‘all; every’ and of course its plural and feminine forms.17 But this same item can also appear in post-head position, as in [31] Esses livros novos todos     ‘these new books all’

Therefore, the item todo must be marked [+PDet, +Mod].18 Esses, ‘these’ (and its singular and feminine forms) occurs in the determiner (Det) position, that is, after the PDet if there is one, at the very beginning, if there is no PDet: esse is then marked [+Det]. This is not the only item that can appear in this function: we have also o ‘the’, aquele ‘that’, algum ‘some’, nenhum ‘no’, cada ‘each’, and perhaps the interrogative words que ‘what’, qual ‘which’.19 I will not go into details of the analysis of these items; this can be found in my works on Portuguese grammar (Perini 2002, 2016; see also Castilho 2010). Here, let us stick  In the written language, there is another item that occurs as a predeterminer, ambos ‘both’, not used in common speech. 18  The positional possibilities of todo ‘all’ are more complex: it can appear outside the NP, while keeping its semantic connection with the head, as in os jacarés fugiram todos ‘the alligators ran away all’. Let us ignore this here, since our concern is with occurrence within the NP. 19  Este ‘this’ is not used in the spoken language, where it is replaced by esse. As for que and qual, they have a rather wide range of functions; here I refer to their interrogative function, as in que cachorro te mordeu? ‘which dog bit you?’. 17

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to our main theme, classification, and examine the feature composition of these few words. Some of these items, like o, aquele, algum, and interrogative que and qual, occur in the NP exclusively in determiner function, being then marked [–PDet,+Det,–Mod] and, of course, also [–NPHead]; the latter is, as we have seen, a consequence of their being semantically [–R]. Algum, actually, occurs as a modifier in more formal styles, and in these cases, when in nonsubject function, always in conjunction with a negated verb, with negative meaning: [32] Ele não ofereceu ajuda alguma.     ‘he offered no help [lit.: he didn’t offer help any]’

Since this use occurs only in the written language, we may disregard it. Now, nenhum ‘no’ occurs both as a determiner and as a modifier: [33] Nenhuma enfermeira adoeceu.     ‘no nurse fell ill’ [34] Enfermeira nenhuma adoeceu.     ‘id. [lit.: nurse no fell ill]’

Nenhum normally occurs with a singular head; its occurrence with a plural is unusual, restricted to the written language, and has an archaic flavor, as for instance in [35] Não admitia negociações nenhumas […]     ‘(He) accepted no negotiations’20

Cada ‘each’ can only be a determiner; it also only occurs with a singular head, and does not agree in gender: [36] Cada aluna/cada aluno vai receber um certificado.     ‘each (female) student/each (male) student will get a certificate’ 20

 Example from Neves (1999, p. 538). The plural seems to be current in Portugal.

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Table 10.1  Some NP components todo esse cada muitos

PDet

Det

Qf

Head

Mod

+ − − −

− + + −

− − − +

− − − (–)

+ − − −

Finally, we may add the function Quantifier, which is defined as occurring after the Det; words like muitos ‘many’ have this function. Assuming that our selection of features is relevant, we can already see how diverse this small group of items is.21 We are then ready to make explicit their feature composition, as far as our five features are concerned. The result is shown in Table 10.1. We may add that o ‘the’ and aquele ‘that’ have the same features as esse ‘this’; and numerals (dois ‘two’, quatro ‘four’, etc.) have the same features as muitos. The table defines three classes for these items.22 But these are certainly not classes in the traditional sense: esse and cada are classed together, but only as far as the features selected are concerned—we keep always in mind that the classification of linguistic units invariably depends on descriptive objectives (as seen in Sect. 4.6). Other information, equally needed for the correct use of the language, must be added. Thus, cada is invariable in gender and number, while esse has plural and feminine forms, so that these words, rigorously speaking, are not in the same “class”. Also, algum ‘some’, at least in the spoken language (in which [32] is not acceptable), has a similar feature matrix to esse, and would occupy the same row in the table; but semantically there are important differences: esse is deictic, algum is not; and algum expresses estimated quantity, whereas esse does not. This means that, as we add new features, the table gets divided in new ways, some classifications cutting across the previous ones, to the point that the only rigorous way to refer to the “class” an item belongs to is to quote its feature matrix in full. This  I leave the interrogatives, que and qual, for some other day.  I have doubts about the possibility of muitos ‘many’ being [-Head]; it may be a head in muitos votam sem pensar ‘many (people) vote without thinking’. This construction will have to wait for a more careful analysis. 21 22

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is another aspect of the fact, mentioned in Chap. 4, that learning and using a language implies the handling of classificatory features, not of the classes themselves.

10.3.2 Pre- and Post-Head Modifier In Portuguese modifiers can appear before or after the head; but since there are important differences, it is better to distinguish here two syntactic functions, the pre-head modifier (PHMod) and the modifier (Mod) tout court. Syntactically, they differ in position, for example, [37] Um excelente pudim     PHMod Head    ‘an excellent custard’ [38] Um pudim excelente     Head Mod    ‘id.’

In this example there is no discernible semantic difference, but in other cases there is. A well-known difference is in the expression of reference restriction. We have seen that several constituents of the NP have the function of restricting the reference of the head; thus, aquele gato ‘that cat’ is not just any cat, but the one that is being pointed at. The Mod has the same function in cases like [39] Os comerciantes honestos

refers to the honest merchants as opposed to dishonest ones. Now, [40] Os honestos comerciantes

also translates as ‘the honest merchants’, but it presupposes that all merchants referred to are honest—that is, reference is not restricted here. In other words, restrictive modifiers (as in [39]) affect the extension of the reference expressed by the head, while nonrestrictive ones only add

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information, and sometimes not even that, as in os frios gelos ‘the cold ices’, where the function of the modifier is to profile a property, that is, to evaluate or singularize one property in relation with the set of characteristics that define the noun in question. (Demonte 1999, p. 147)

The difference is not syntactically marked in English; in Portuguese, at least in many cases, nonrestrictive qualifiers appear in PHMod function. The full range of this rule has not been properly researched, but that there are exceptions is known. In particular, modifiers with deictic reference are restrictive regardless of position, for example, [41] O atual governo    ‘the current government’ [42] O governo atual    ‘id.’

Both NPs refer to the current government as opposed to past or future ones. Another semantic difference between these two functions is mentioned in Sect. 10.2.4: some semantic roles, among which Agent, Patient, and Source, are not available at the PHMod position: [43] A decisão presidencial/*a presidencial decisão (Agent)    ‘presidential decision’ [44] Preservação ambiental/* ambiental preservação (Patient)    ‘environmental preservation’ [45] Cozinha britânica/* britânica cozinha (Source, that is, “provenience”)    ‘British cuisine’

Furthermore, we saw that there are a few items that occur in both functions, but with a clear change in meaning: [46] Uma simples secretária    ‘a mere secretary’

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[47] Uma secretária simples    ‘a modest secretary’

Only [46] incorporates the intimation that being a secretary is something not too important. Finally, there are items that can only appear in PHMod function, by obscure reasons: mero ‘mere’, baita ‘big’, puta ‘id.’, súper ‘id.’, and some others:23 [48] Um baita/puta/súper salário     ‘a very high salary’

The case of Agent, Patient, Source, and so on can be reduced to rules; an item like britânico ‘British’ in [45] must in any case be marked semantically as “proventive”, and this entails that it cannot be a PHMod. That the constraint is indeed semantic is shown by the fact that britânico can sometimes appear in PHMod function, provided that its meaning is not proventive: [49] A britânica pontualidade do mestre     ‘the teacher’s British(-like) punctuality’

This prevents the marking of the item britânico simply as [–PHMod]. In the cases of baita ‘big’ and simples ‘mere, modest’, however, the item must be lexically marked, and the mark will be syntactic in the case of baita [–PHMod]; in the case of simples, all we can do at present is to mark it as [–Mod] when meaning ‘mere’, which looks very strange, but accurately describes the facts as observed. Note that in these cases too the PHMod tends to be nonrestrictive, which may provide a way to state the properties of these items in a more theoretically satisfying manner. Right now, though, I am skeptic about this possibility, both because of the deictic items mentioned earlier in connection with example [41], and because baita, puta, súper in [48] sound restrictive to me.  This includes the (slightly archaic) use of the loanword big: um big salário ‘a high salary’; never *um salário big. 23

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These two functions, pre-head modifier and modifier, have the property of occurring more than once in an NP. In the case of the PHMod, repetition occurs in [50] Os honestos, responsáveis comerciantes     ‘the honest, responsible merchants’

Mod has a wider range of repetition, and also of structures: besides single words (“adjectives”), it can also be filled in by prepositional phrases: [51] Os comerciantes [de vinho] [honestos] [de Lisboa]     ‘the honest wine merchants of Lisbon’

There may be functional differences between these complements, but they will not be studied here. It is well known that there are ordering restrictions on repeated modifiers; for English, there are studies like Vendler (1968) and subsequent work. These works suggest that most of the ordering restrictions are semantic, having to do with clustering, and also with the individual meaning of words. Thus, to take one of Vendler’s examples, broken human bones is adequate when we are speaking of human bones, but human broken bones suggests we are speaking of broken bones. If all restrictions are semantic, we may be able to keep the modifier as one syntactic function, and if not, it will have to be split into more than one function; for the moment being, I assume the constraints are meaning-based, and keep the modifier as one function, defined as a nonhead constituent occurring after the head.24

10.4 Positional Classification We can now classify some of these items, taking into account only their relative positions within the NP (except for the head, of course). Let us consider the possibilities of each to occur in six functions, namely  So-called adjectives are a most heterogeneous lot, semantically speaking; even disregarding their overlapping with “nouns”, shown in Chap. 4, there are many meaning categories, within the general group of reference-restricting items; for Portuguese, a preliminary study is found in Borges Neto (1991). 24

215

10  Functions and Classes in the NP  Table 10.2  Some NP constituents, classed by position todo ‘all’ muitos ‘many’ o ‘the’ cada ‘each’ excelente ‘excellent’ baita ‘big’ velho ‘old’ mesa ‘table’ palhaço ‘clown’ presidencial ‘presidential’

PDet

Det

Qf

PHMod

H

Mod

+ − − − − − − − − −

− − + + − − − − − −

− + − − − − − − − −

− − − − + + + − − −

− (−) − − − − + + + −

+ − − − + − + − + +

predeterminer (PDet), determiner (Det), quantifier (Qf), pre-head modifier (PHMod), head (H), and modifier (Mod), as summarized in Table 10.2.25 As seen, for these ten items we need nine classes; only o and cada are (by these features) identical. Of course, when one takes these six features and all possible items, the proportion of items with identical feature composition will be much more favorable; but the table is enough to show the variety of grammatical behaviors among the constituents of the NP. As far as I know, no analysis comes near to representing all this complexity.26 Table 10.2 only considers formal factors, and not all of them. For instance, cada and baita are invariable in gender and number; all others nonhead terms do vary, although gender does not show for excelente. We still have semantic differences between these items—for instance, o ‘the’ is a marker of given status; presidential is agentive, and several other items appearing in the same distribution are patientive (preservação ambiental ‘environmental preservation’) or proventive (cozinha chinesa ‘Chinese cuisine); and many others, any of which may, in principle, affect grammatical behavior. There are also items that do not fit easily into the categories shown. The word outro ‘other’ at first sight is problematic because of its free occurrence before or after a quantifier:  Here (as so often) there are complications: I mark todo ‘all’ as [-Head], but this lexeme can occur as a head, but only in the plural, as in todos desconfiam desse ministro ‘all mistrust this minister’. 26  NGB, the semi-official system utilized in Brazilian schools, only represents two functions in the NP, all nonhead constituents being “adnominal adjuncts”. 25

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M. A. Perini

[52] Duas outras garrafas    ‘two other bottles’ [53] Outras duas garrafas    ‘id.’ [54] Uma outra garrafa    ‘one other bottle’

As far as the functions in Table 10.2 are concerned, we might analyze outro as [+Qf ], but then one must admit that more than one quantifier may occur in an NP, a poor analysis because this double occurrence would have to be conditioned to the presence of outro, no other putative quantifier having this property. This amounts to saying that outro has a different behavior from other quantifiers, the same as saying that outro has another function. Other co-occurrences are not acceptable, but this may be by reasons of semantic compatibility: obviously we cannot have *três cinco ‘three five’, or *muitos dois ‘many two’ in a single NP. This analysis, however, does not agree with the impossibility of [55] * Outra uma garrafa    ‘other one bottle’

against the acceptable [54]. All we can conclude, for the moment at least, is that this item is still in wait of a sufficiently complete study, which will probably place outro in yet another class.

10.5 Inherent and Governed Gender 10.5.1 Gender Agreement Gender in Portuguese is a mixed, semantic-formal phenomenon. Although gender itself is a formal, semantically unmotivated feature, the fact itself that a word belongs to a gender can be reduced to semantic terms: a word has gender if and only if it has referential meaning, that is, when it is [R]—not [+R], which is a potentiality, but [R], referential in

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the present context. This is an additional argument against a model of grammar that requires morphosyntactic rules to apply strictly before semantic interpretation.27 Two kinds of gender phenomena must be distinguished: inherent gender, which is the fact that certain words belong to a particular gender class (e.g., casa ‘house’ is feminine, carro ‘car’ is masculine); and governed gender, which is the fact that certain words take on a particular morphological marking in order to agree with another word (which has inherent gender). Belonging to a gender means having the property of triggering that gender in agreeing items; this is thus a syntactic phenomenon. Thus, in a casa amarela ‘the yellow house’ both a and amarela are feminine (or, rather, are in the feminine) because they agree in gender with casa, which is inherently feminine. Agreeing items28 normally come in two forms, and that is why we have o and a, amarelo and amarela. The assignment of particular items to each of the genders is largely unpredictable:29 there is no independent reason for casa to be feminine, for example. But the presence itself of inherent gender, as against governed gender, or no gender at all, is totally predictable from the semantics of an item in a particular context, namely, all words in referential function ([R]) have inherent gender. This rule has no exceptions in the language. For instance, the word cinzento ‘grey’ comes in two forms, masculine cinzento and feminine cinzenta;30 which is to occur is decided by agreement rules, working on the inherent gender of the head of the NP, when cinzento has qualifying function. The word cinzento can also have referential function, and thus be a head; and in that case it is necessarily masculine, never feminine: [56] Um cinzento escuro     ‘a dark grey (color)’  Another such argument is the identification of the NP head, which in its turn determines certain formal features in the construction (see Sect. 10.2.4). 28  That is, lexemes. 29  It is predictable, in part, for a semantically definable set of items, those referring to human beings and some animals: these items are feminine when referring to females, masculine when referring to males; but there are several exceptions. 30  Plus the respective plurals. 27

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[57] * Uma cinzenta escura

In other cases a word usually thought of as an adjective can become feminine when taken referentially, as branca ‘white’, negra ‘black’, or brasileira ‘Brazilian’ when referring to women, as in [58] Uma negra alta     ‘a tall black (woman)’ [59] As brancas são sensíveis ao sol.     ‘white (women) are sensitive to sunlight’ [60] Aquela brasileira    ‘that Brazilian (woman)’

10.5.2 Gender Taxonomy In what concerns the taxonomy, we distinguish between words that have a gender (some are feminine, some masculine) and words that agree in gender (and these must have feminine and masculine forms). The first category is always clearly ascertainable: ponte ‘bridge’ is feminine, and monte ‘hill’ is masculine, as shown by the agreement they impose on their dependents; there are no exceptions, and a word must have one of the genders if it is to be used referentially. As for governed gender, it shows in most words, as bom, fem. boa ‘good’ and cinzento, fem. cinzenta ‘grey’; many, however, do not vary, as simples ‘simple’, nacional ‘national’, inteligente ‘intelligent’, and cada ‘each’, which have the same form for both genders. This is, of course, another criterion for classification; in summary, nominal items can have inherent or governed gender, and the latter may or not show their gender in their phonological form. And, of course, many items can occur with inherent gender in some contexts and with governed gender in other contexts, as for instance [60] Aquela brasileira    ‘that Brazilian (woman)’

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[61] A indústria brasileira    ‘the Brazilian industry’

which places them in yet another subclass of nominals. As we have seen, this double syntax correlates closely with an important semantic feature: when in the NP head function, and therefore with inherent gender, these items are referential, [R]; when in modifier function, with governed gender, they are (usually) reference-restrictive, [Q]. This is an example where syntax and meaning go together; they do not always do, as is well known.

10.6 Pronouns So-called pronouns are a heterogeneous set of items, grouped into one catch-all class by traditional grammars. There is little consistency in the way grammatical traditions treat these items. We have, first, “personal pronouns”, traditionally defined as items that refer to the persons of discourse, deictically or anaphorically. Thus (to take English examples), I refers (deictically) to the speaker, we to the speaker plus at least one more person; you refers, also deictically, to the receptor (singular or plural). As for the so-called third person, including the items he, she, it, and they, they are better defined by exclusion: they refer, deictically or anaphorically, to entities distinct from both the speaker and the receptor. These are semantic features which are certainly present in these words, and are part of their functional potential. These items, however, also have other features, which set them sharply apart from the rest of the lexicon; the most salient of these features is case inflection, which in English applies to all of them if we include so-called possessive items (Table 10.3). Table 10.3  Case inflection in English personal pronouns Subj

Obj

Poss

 I you  he she  it  we they

 me you him her  it  us them

 my your  his  her  its  our their

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In Portuguese the system is more complex (for a complete description see Perini 2002, chapter 8),31 but in what concerns us here it is equivalent to English, also including case inflection. In English (at least in the more formal varieties) case inflection also occurs in relatives (who, whom, whose); in Portuguese, it is an exclusive feature of personal pronouns. We have then three features that define tolerably well the set of items traditionally called “personal pronouns”: their semantic properties of referring to the persons of discourse, and of being used deictically and anaphorically; and their morphological property of inflecting for case. There are other features, like the fact that they can be NP heads (which is predictable, since they are [+R]), but not allowing modifiers or any other terms in the same NP: *this you, *happy I, and so on. All this means that we have here a well-defined class—a “closed” one, since the set of members is small and not subject to variation from speaker to speaker. But this refers to personal pronouns only; the traditional classification gives the same label, “pronoun”, to very different items. I fail to see any common features valid for personal, relative, indefinite, demonstrative, and other pronouns. Relative pronouns have nothing to do with the persons of discourse, and indefinite pronouns (algum ‘some’, nenhum ‘no; none’) are semantically and syntactically similar to quantifiers. So-called demonstrative pronouns (like esse ‘this’, aquele ‘that’) may be put in an approximate relation with the persons of discourse (esse livro ‘this book’ is a book that is close to me or to you, aquele livro ‘that book’ is far from both), but syntactically they function like determiners, and cannot be NP heads. As far as I can see at present, there is no good motivation for the class of “pronouns”, understood in its traditional extension. What we do have, as usual, is a set of features which distribute among the several items without bringing them under the same class. These features include the ones given in the following list; they are not necessarily the only ones with grammatical import, but let us limit our description to these nine. Some of the features are semantic, namely,  This is a point in which European and Brazilian Portuguese differ markedly.

31

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• Features descriptive of the referential and reference-restrictive potential: [R] (semantic, but with syntactic correlation, as seen in 4.3.3: all and only items marked [+R] can be NP heads). [Q] (also with syntactic correlation: items marked [+Q] can be modifiers). • Features descriptive of the deictic and anaphoric potential: [Deictic] [Anaphoric] • Features relative to reference to persons of discourse: [1st p] [2nd p] Here we may adopt the convention that so-called first person items are marked [+1st p, −2nd p]; second person items have the converse markings; and third person items are [–1st p, −2nd p]. This follows a traditional insight, already expressed by Jespersen: In the first person one speaks of oneself, in the second of the person to whom the speech is addressed, and in the third of neither. (Jespersen 1924, p. 212)

The remaining features are morphosyntactic: • Features descriptive of syntactic function: [Det] (determiner) [NP mate] (the property of co-occurring with other terms in the NP) Items such as I (Port. eu) are marked [–NPmate]; most nominals are marked positively for this feature. This means that items marked

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[–NPmate] always represent the whole NP, without any accompanying terms.32 • And one feature descriptive of morphological inflection: [Case] (belonging to a lexeme connected by case relations).33 These nine features describe many of the grammatical properties of traditional pronouns. The features distribute among the pronouns as instanced in Table 10.4, which includes a few items that figure in the list of pronouns in traditional Portuguese grammars, with a couple of nonpronominal items thrown in for comparison. Ela ‘she’ is marked [–Case] because in spoken Brazilian it does not vary in case; the object form is ela, and the possessive is dela (a contraction of the preposition de plus ela).34 Você ‘you’ is used for both subject and object, and its possessive form is seu; but it has an alternative, and very common, object form, te—therefore, it varies in case after all. The table shows that these seven items are all different according to the features considered; yet the first five are all analyzed as pronouns in traditional grammar, in spite of being all different in feature composition. The Table 10.4  “Pronominal” features of some items eu ‘I’ ela ‘she’ você ‘you’ outro ‘other’ esse ‘this’ amigo ‘friend’ Paulo

R

Q

Deict

Anaph

1stp

2ndp

Det

NPmate

Case

+ + + − − + +

− − − + + + −

+ + + − + − −

− + − − + − −

+ − − − − − −

− − + − − − −

− − − − + − −

− − − + + + +

+ − + − − − −

 It can have an apposition, always marked by a comma: você, o primeiro da turma. ‘you, the first in the class’. 33  The word case has been used in more than one meaning; here it refers to the morphological category. 34  By the way, the use of ele, ela as an object is no novelty in Portuguese, and is not specifically Brazilian: Vasconcelos (1922, p. 37, 139) gives examples from thirteenth-century legal texts. 32

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table must eventually be completed by including other “pronouns”, and certainly also other features. Some of the items in question show a very different grammatical behavior, as is the case with relatives like que ‘which’, traditionally classified as pronouns.

10.7 Summary: Word Classes in the NP The quick analysis of the NP shown in the preceding sections should be sufficient to give an idea of the number and variety of features that contribute to categorize the items occurring as its internal constituents. We have first several syntactic functions, of which we have seen the following: Predeterminer, Determiner, Quantifier, NPHead, and Modifier. Table 10.2 shows ten items and how they classify according to these criteria; they must be put into no less than nine classes. And this, as seen, does not exhaust the possibilities found in the grammar. Apart from the syntactic functions shown in the table (which, except for NPHead, are all positional), we have some others that apply directly to the items, such as inherent gender (compulsory for all items marked [+R]), and governed gender, which admit of some exceptions such as cada ‘each’, excelente ‘excellent’, and also baita ‘big’ and laranja ‘orange (color)’, which do not vary in gender. We then come to personal pronouns, which have some features of their own. Personal pronouns (that is, the items so classified in the usual grammars) may be defined as items having the features [+R, −Q, +Deictic, −NPmate]. They differ among them by features like [Anaphoric], [Case], [1st person], and [2nd person]. Finally, there are some generalizations (that is, redundancies), of which the most important is the one that stipulates that all and only items marked [+R] can be NP heads, and must be classified by inherent gender whenever they are not pronouns. Personal pronouns are [+R] and have inherent gender, but this is determined not lexically as it is for mesa ‘table’ (feminine) and banco ‘bench’ (masculine), but by deixis: eu ‘I’ is masculine when spoken by a man, feminine when used by a woman: [62] Eu estou cansado/cansada.     ‘I am tired (m)/(f )’

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Some other personal pronouns have inherent gender according to the general model: ele ‘he’ is masculine, ela ‘she’ is feminine. Some of these properties are new, but most are recognized, in one way or another, in traditional analysis. But the analysis by features yields a more systematic picture of the highly complex way the set of items usually called “pronouns” pattern in the language. In this chapter I gave a preliminary view of this complex structure, which however is still far from a complete panorama of the phenomenon. This will have to wait for further research.

References Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. London: Allen and Unwin. Borges Neto, José. 1991. Adjetivos: predicados extensionais e predicados intensionais. Campinas: Ed. UNICAMP. Bosque, Ignacio. 1989. Las categorías gramaticales: relaciones y diferencias [Grammatical categories: relations and differences]. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis. Castilho, Ataliba T. de. 2010. Nova gramática do português brasileiro [A new grammar of Brazilian Portuguese]. São Paulo: Contexto. Company, Concepción C. 1991. La frase sustantiva en español medieval [The NP in medieval Spanish]. México: UNAM. Demonte, Violeta. 1999. El adjetivo: Clases y usos. La posición del adjetivo en el sintagma nominal [The adjective: Classes and usage. Adjective position in the NP]. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española [Descriptive grammar of the Spanish language], ed. Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte. Madrid: Espasa. Fraser, Norman M., Greville G.  Corbett, and Scott McGlashan. 1993. Introduction. In Heads in grammatical theory, ed. Greville G.  Corbett, Norman M. Fraser, and Scott McGlashan. Cambridge University Press. Fulgêncio, Lúcia. 2008. Expressões fixas e idiomatismos do português brasileiro [Fixed expressions and idioms in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: Doctoral thesis, PUC-Minas. Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge University Press. Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin.

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Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume I, theoretical prerequisites. Stanford University Press. Liberato, Yara G. 1997. A estrutura do SN em português: uma abordagem cognitiva. [The structure of the NP in Portuguese: a cognitive approach]. UFMG: Doctoral thesis. McGlashan, Scott. 1993. Heads and lexical semantics. In Heads in grammatical theory, ed. G. Corbett, N. Fraser, and S. McGlashan. Cambridge University Press. Neves, Maria H. de Moura. 1999. Gramática de usos do português [Usage grammar of portuguese]. São Paulo: Editora UNESP. Nichols, Johanna. 1986. Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Language 62: 56–119. Perini, Mário A. 2002. Modern Portuguese: A reference grammar. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2016. Gramática descritiva do português brasileiro. Petrópolis: Vozes. Perini, Mário A., Regina Bessa, Sigrid T. Fraiha, and Lúcia Fulgêncio. 1996. O Sintagma nominal em português: Estrutura, significado e função. [The NP in Portuguese: Structure, meaning, and function] Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, extra issue, Belo Horizonte: UFMG. Strawson, P.F. 1950. On referring. Mind 50: 320–344. Vasconcelos, J.  Leite de. 1922. Textos arcaicos [archaic texts]. Lisboa: Livraria Clássica Editora. Vendler, Zeno. 1968. Adjectives and nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton. Zwicky, Arnold. 1993. Heads, bases, and functors. In Heads in grammatical theory, ed. Greville G. Corbett, Norman M. Fraser, and Scott McGlashan. Cambridge University Press.

11 Towards a Taxonomy of Connectives

11.1 Conjunctions, Prepositions, etc. 11.1.1 Definitions A connective can be loosely defined as a lexical item (a word or an idiom) that, together with some syntactic unit, generates a sequence with a different functional potential.1 We saw some examples in Chap. 4; for instance, an NP like Beth, when preceded by a preposition as in com Beth ‘with Beth’, makes up a unit whose functional potential is clearly distinct from that of an NP. Equally, a sentence like vai chover ‘it is going to rain’, when preceded by the conjunction que ‘that’ makes up an NP, which can be a subject, an object, or the complement of a preposition, functions that a tensed sentence, by itself, cannot be. According to this definition, a relative is also a connective, although it entails some additional complexity; thus, a relative construction like que você não conhece ‘which you do not know’ has a functional potential analogous to an adjective, being able to occur as part of an NP, semantically restricting the reference of the  This definition does not cover precisely all items traditionally called connectives: it fails in the case of so-called coordinating conjunctions; see below. 1

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head: uma teoria que você não conhece ‘a theory which you do not know’ is not any theory, but a restricted subset of theories. In our present terms, a sequence of connective plus complement has different classificatory features, that is, belongs to a different class, than just the complement, be it an NP, a sentence, or some other unit. In some cases a preposition occurs before an adverbial item, as lá ‘there’, which denotes a Location, as against de lá ‘from there’, which denotes a Source. This is just another aspect of the same phenomenon, since de lá has a different functional potential from lá. Here the preposition occurs before an adverbial, not an NP. There are also cases of prepositions before qualifiers, as in ela passou de triste a eufórica ‘she went from sad to euphoric’.2 Syntactic connectives are traditionally distinguished as “prepositions” and “conjunctions”; here, as so often, the usual classification is too simple.3 In this chapter I examine a set of items traditionally so classified, and show that there are other relevant distinctions, which can be described by using classificatory features, as we have done for other groups of items in the preceding chapters. Bosque (1989) captures the essence of the question in the following passage: […] several grammarians in our tradition have postulated a class of “particles”, covering the categories known as preposition, conjunction, and adverb. This position […] does not entail […] that the category we now call preposition has the same grammar as the one we call conjunction, but rather that both classes share one or several properties […]. (Bosque 1989, p. 27)

Bosque identifies the problem adequately, although he stops short of proposing an analysis of connectives by features. Here I intend to take this last step, and reduce the traditional classification to bunches of relatively autonomous properties, associated to each of the items involved. Classes, in the traditional sense, may arise from the examination of a sufficient number of such bunches of features. But the resulting classes are  There is a good study of Portuguese connectives in Ilari (ed.) 2015, to which I owe part of the following discussion. 3  The question was already introduced in Chap. 4; here I bring in some more examples that show new aspects of the complexity of the matter. 2

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unlikely to be mutually exclusive: the most we can expect is that some bunches will be valid for a comparatively great number of items, as opposed to less widespread, or even unique, ones. Let us start with a rough definition of these two traditional classes. A preposition can be preliminarily defined as a word which, together with a following NP, makes up an adverbial or an adjective phrase: [1] A janela do apartamento (do = de + o) ‘the window of the apartment’ [2] Um churrasco na fazenda (na = em + a) ‘a barbecue at the farm’

In [1], the sequence do apartamento, analyzable as de [o apartamento]NP , has a semantic and syntactic function analogous to that of an item like branca ‘white’ in a janela branca ‘the white window’. It occurs in the modifier position, and functions semantically as a reference restrictor. In [2], na fazenda ‘at the farm’ fills in the semantic role Location, and corresponds thematically to aqui ‘here’. One effect of the presence of a connective is that it marks a constituent as part of a larger constituent, with a syntactic and semantic function within this larger constituent. Thus, do apartamento ‘of the apartment’ is one of the terms in the NP a janela do apartamento ‘the window of the apartment’, having the syntactic function modifier and the semantic function Possessor. But it must be observed that embedding of constituents does not depend on the presence of a connective: a subject, or an object, is also a syntactic part of a sentence, and has thematic relations in it, although it is not marked by connectives. Connectives are, therefore, just one of the resources a language uses in order to subordinate some constituents to larger ones. In traditional grammar, conjunctions are, in fact, a composite class. For the moment we are concerned with “subordinating” conjunctions; so-called coordinating conjunctions have radically different functions, both syntactically and semantically, and will be considered in Sect. 11.2. With this restriction, a conjunction is a word which, in construction with

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a (tensed) sentence,4 makes up an NP or an adverbial phrase, as respectively in [3] Mamãe disse que choveu ontem. (que choveu ontem is an NP)     ‘Mom said that it rained yesterday’ [4] Vou pensar nisso quando chegar a hora. (quando chegar a hora is an AdvP)     ‘I’ll think about that when the time arrives’

As seen, even by their definition both prepositions and conjunctions are of more than one type, and this will have to be taken into account eventually in our exposition.

11.1.2 Como: Preposition or Conjunction? The definitions given earlier for these two classes are, I hope, uncontroversial,5 but they have some surprises in store. One of these is the word como, usually translated as ‘like; since’, and classified as a conjunction. We have already seen it in Sect. 4.5.4, in connection with the examples [5] Como a denúncia não foi confirmada, o prisioneiro foi libertado.     ‘since the accusation was not confirmed, the prisoner was set free’ [6] Minha filha toca como Argerich.     ‘my daughter plays like Argerich’

As we saw there, in [5] como precedes a sentence (a denúncia não foi confirmada ‘the accusation was not confirmed’), and the sequence functions as an adjunct of Cause, which is analyzed as “adverbial” in the traditional doctrine. In [6], como precedes an NP (Argerich), again to make up an “adverbial” (but nonsentential) constituent. This means that in [5]  A unit A is “in construction with” another unit B when both, together, form a higher-order unit, [AB]C. 5  The definitions given in traditional grammars are all but useless, but from the practice of analysis a more coherent picture emerges. 4

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como answers the definition of a conjunction, and in [6] it must be a preposition.6 Como can also help forming a restrictive complement, as in [7] Um biólogo como você não se engana facilmente.     ‘a biologist like you is not easily mistaken’

where como você ‘like you’ restricts the reference of um biólogo ‘a biologist’, and would traditionally be an “adjective” phrase. Again, como here looks like a preposition, to use traditional terms. Asking whether como is, after all, a preposition or a conjunction makes little sense in view of these examples. What we have here is an item which, unlike most so-called prepositions and conjunctions, has a wider distribution, describable in the way seen in Sect. 4.5.4, namely [+(~NP)Cn, +(~S)Cn]. An item like com ‘with’ is, naturally, [+(~NP)Cn, –(~S)Cn], and quando ‘when’ is [–(~NP)Cn, +(~S)Cn]. We have here the situation already found so often in this discussion: the grammatical behavior of lexical items cannot be described by placing them in mutually exclusive classes, but calls for a more complex matrix of classificatory features. We may add that como also occurs in interrogative sentences like [8] Como você conseguiu fazer isso?     ‘how did you manage to do that?’

Como is, then, an item with a relatively complex functional potential, definitely not classifiable as just a conjunction (like que ‘that’, quando ‘when’) or as a preposition (like de ‘of ’, em ‘in’).

11.1.3 A Sample So-called prepositions and conjunctions may then be analyzed by features; this is still work to be done, as there are close to a hundred such items in the language (counting composite ones like além de ‘besides’). I give below a sample of nine items, which should be sufficient to give an idea of the complexity of the grammatical behavior of such connectives.  See 4.5.4 for a fuller discussion, with refutation of a frequent, but inadequate, proposal to circumvent the dilemma. 6

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Table 11.1   Some features of nine connectives antes de ‘before’ apesar de ‘in spite of’ exceto ‘except’ até ‘even’ com ‘with’ a fim de ‘in order to’ além de ‘besides’ fora ‘except’ como ‘like; since’

(~NP)Cn

(~Inf)Cn

(~queS)Cn

(~S)Cn

+ + + + + − + + +

+ + + + − + + + −

+ + + + − + − − −

− − − − − − − − +

Antes de and apesar de lose their de before que S: antes que ela saísse ‘before she left’

To start, let us consider only four features, namely occurrence in construction with (a) an NP, (b) an infinitive, (c) que + S (corresponding to English that + S), and (d) a tensed S (without que); I give one example of each of these environments: [9] Jaqueline chegou antes de Gabriel. (~NP) (‘~’ = in construction with)     ‘Jaqueline arrived before Gabriel’ [10] Jaqueline bebe antes de jantar. (~infinitive)     ‘Jaqueline drinks before dining’ [11] Tudo correu bem, exceto que choveu. (~que + sentence)     ‘everything went fine, except that it rained’ 12] Como estava chovendo, adiamos o piquenique. (~tensed sentence)     ‘as it was raining, we postponed the picnic’

The behavior of nine connectives according to these four features is represented on Table 11.1. As seen, these nine connectives must be distinguished into five classes, according to the four features considered.7

 Actually, como occurs before an infinitive in não sei como escapar dessa ‘I don’t know how to escape this (situation)’; here it is an indirect interrogative, with features that do not appear in this table. 7

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11.1.4 Até The word até appears in Table 11.1 as having a functional potential identical to antes de ‘before’, apesar de ‘in spite of ’, and exceto ‘except’. But this is due to the limited list of features included in the table; actually, até has a more complex behavior.8 First of all, as shown in Table 11.1, até occurs before an NP, be it nonsentential, infinitive, or sentential: [13] Caminhamos até a igreja. ‘we walked until the church’ [14] Caminhamos até cansar. Inf ‘we walked until we got tired’ (lit.: until tire) [15] Caminhamos até que a chuva começou. ‘we walked until the rain began’

In these examples, até signals a Goal, either physically locational, as in [13], or defined in another space, as in [14] and [15], where the end point of an event is denoted; here até behaves like many other “prepositions”, and has nothing peculiar about it. Até never occurs directly introducing a clause (i.e., without a complementizer), which would be the typical function of a conjunction; so, judging by the examples in the table alone, até would be a preposition.9 But it occurs with a reinforcing semantic function, as in [16] Até o Nilson gostou do concerto. ‘even Nilson enjoyed the concert’

As seen, in these cases até closely corresponds to English even. Semantically, até here has an argumentative function, with two main ingredients: first, it establishes an opposition between  A good survey of the functions of até is found in Castilho et al. (2014) and Ilari et al. (2015).  The classification found in traditional analysis is preposition and adverb, according to context.

8 9

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[…] an individual (or subset) and a set [where] all individuals identified by the latter make the sentence true, and the same applies to the profiled individual or subset. (Castilho et al. 2014, p. 322)

and, second, the sentence provides an argument for some event referring to the complement of até ‘even’—in [16], the fact that Nilson, against expectations, enjoyed the concert, which constitutes additional proof of the quality of the latter.10 In this function, até enters into a construction with a wide variety of units: with an NP, as in [16], and also with a prepositional phrase: [17] O Nilson gostou até do concerto. ‘Nilson enjoyed even the concert [lit.: of the concert]’

with a qualifier: [18] O Nilson parecia até interessado. ‘Nilson looked even interested’

with an adverbial: [19] O Nilson trabalha até cuidadosamente. ‘Nilson works even carefully’

and with a verb: [20] Até choveu, depois das duas horas. ‘it even rained, after two o’clock’

Castilho et al. (2014) call it an adverb in these cases, but it would not be typical, because it can profile an NP;11 and in any case, even when it is in construction with a verb, it does not add a “circumstance”, but rather an argumentative element. It does not have connective function here, at least in the sense that a connective “connects” terms in a sentence; and it is not  This argumentative analysis follows Ducrot (1980).  Adverbs “appear in the sentence as partners of the verb, the adjective or another adverb” (Castilho et al. 2014, p. 267). 10 11

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an internal constituent of the NP, as shown by the position of the preposition in [17], analyzed as até de [o concerto]NP . Perhaps we should admit that até before an NP has an idiosyncratic function, perhaps unique to this item. Ilari et al. (2015) also point out that até can appear as an intensifier, “as an adverb, without relating two lexical items” (p. 275)—that is, again, not as a connective. Their example is [21] Ela falou, falou, falou até. ‘she spoke, spoke, spoke a lot’

Actually, even in cases like [16]–[20] até has a function of reinforcement, or profiling, plus the expression of an argument in favor of an assertion—in [17] for instance, in favor of the high quality of the concert. Table 11.1 is then still incomplete, in what respects the features of até, since it only includes its “prepositional” functions (exemplified in [13]–[15]). Let us say, as a preliminary analysis, that até is a profiler in these cases; this feature may have to be eventually distinguished into several others, since até profiles not only NPs, but as seen prepositional phrases, qualifiers, adverbials, and verbs; for the moment, though, let us be content with this one feature, [Prof ]. It is, of course, a nonconnective feature, and does not take the mark ‘Cn’; and an item bearing it occurs before the profiled element, as in [16]–[20]. We have finally the function instanced in [21], where até patterns like other intensifiers like muito ‘a lot’, and occurs after the unit it modifies. Let us call this function verb modifier (VMod). We can then complete the functional potential of até as in Table 11.2, where some other items are added for comparison: Table 11.2  Até and other connectives and adverbials até ‘even’ antes de ‘before’ com ‘with’ como ‘like; since’ muito ‘very; a lot’ quando ‘when’

(~NP)Cn

(~Inf)Cn

(~que S)Cn

(~S)Cn

Prof

VMod

+ + + + − −

+ + − − − −

+ + − − − −

− − − + − +

+ − − − − −

+ + − − + −

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As seen, these six items must be placed into six classes, since no two of them have identical feature matrixes. As far as is known, no other lexical item has exactly the same set of functions as até, which shows that its classification, as of so many others items, can only be accurately described by a set of features. But, for reasons already seen in Sect. 4.2.1, I must disagree with statements like [the preposition até] can even be used with a value of adverb, without relating two lexical items […]. (Ilari et al. 2015, p. 275)

The item até is not a preposition, nor is it an adverb according to context. Rather, até is an item that appears in a wide variety of functions, and it is the set of its functions that define its classification. If, as is likely, no other item shows the same set of functions, then we must recognize that até does not fit in any class except the one of which it is the sole member. Finally, Ilari et al. observe that There is no record of any verb governing the preposition até […] (Ilari et al. 2015, p. 275)

which is basically true of this, and also of several other items with “prepositional” features. Actually, the set of prepositions12 governed by verbs in their valencies is rather small: the Valency dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese verbs includes in its present draft form (November, 2020) only the following: a, com, como, de, em, para, por, and perhaps contra, sobre. There is, however, one diathesis that seems to require até, in sentences like [22] O terreno vai até o riacho. ‘the land extends to the creek’

where the usual alternates to locative até, namely a and para, are not acceptable. If this holds, then the verb ir ‘go’, in its acception ‘extend’ (e.g., said of land) does require até in one of its diatheses.  Let us use this word, colloquially, to mean “an item in one of the functions traditionally attributed to prepositions”. 12

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11.2 Subordinators and Coordinators 11.2.1 Subordinators Let us now have a look at so-called conjunctions, which must be distinguished into at least two main classes. These classes are traditionally termed “subordinative” and “coordinative” conjunctions, but in fact they are so different as to deserve entirely separate labels; I call them here, respectively, subordinators and coordinators. A subordinator is

a connective (as defined earlier) which, in construction with a clause, makes up an NP or an adverbial phrase,

as in the sentences we saw in Chap. 3: [23] Mamãe disse que vai chover. ‘Mom said that it is going to rain’ [24] Mamãe riu quando eu caí. ‘Mom laughed when I fell’

In [23], que vai chover ‘that it is going to rain’ is the object of the verb, disse ‘said’, and has the syntactic properties of an NP: it can also be a subject, or complement of a preposition. Quando eu caí ‘when I fell’ has the semantic role Time, and is traditionally analyzed as an adverbial phrase.

11.2.2 Coordinators Coordinators are also traditionally called “conjunctions”, but have a clearly different function: instead of changing the functional potential of a constituent they introduce, coordinators take two (or more) constituents with the same grammatical properties and join them into a larger constituent which has again the same properties as the two smaller ones.

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The most typical coordinator is e ‘and’: [25] O cachorro e o gato fugiram do quintal. ‘the dog and the cat ran away from the backyard’ [26] Choveu e fez muito frio. ‘it rained and got very cold’ [27] Esse político é desonesto e grosseiro. ‘this politician is dishonest and rude’

In [25] the joined constituents are two NPs; in [26], we have two sentences; in [28] two words. The coordinated elements not only belong to the same class, but also have the same syntactic and semantic functions in the sentence. This allows them to be analyzed as a set, as when we say that o cachorro e o gato ‘the dog and the cat’ is the (compound) subject of sentence [25], and has the semantic role Agent. The separate NPs o cachorro ‘the dog’ and o gato ‘the cat’ each inherit the semantic role of the larger NP, so that we understand that the dog ran away, and so did the cat. Coordinators need more study, since the indications are that they show some diversity of grammatical behavior—quite apart from their semantic differences, which are usually listed in grammars (as “additive”, “adversative”, and so on). They have some features in common, and differ in other respects; one of the common features is that the coordinator plus the following constituent do not make up themselves a constituent; that is, o cachorro e o gato ‘the dog and the cat’ in [25] is an NP, but e o gato is not a constituent at all (o gato is). One consequence of this is that the sequence made up of coordinator plus constituent cannot be fronted in the sentence, nor can it appear in a cleft construction: [28] * E o gato o cachorro fugiram do quintal. ‘*and the cat the dog ran away from the backyard’ [29] * Foi e o gato que o cachorro fugiram/fugiu do quintal. ‘*it was and the cat that the dog ran away from the backyard’

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Compare with [23] Mamãe disse que vai chover. ‘Mom said that it is going to rain’ [30] Que vai chover, mamãe disse. ‘that it is going to rain, Mom said’ [31] Foi que vai chover que mamãe disse. ‘it was that it is going to rain that Mom said’

where a subordinate construction is fronted and cleft without causing unacceptability.13 Apart from this, there is a certain amount of diversity in grammatical behavior among the several coordinators. For instance, e ‘and’, ou ‘or’, mas ‘but’, and entretanto ‘however’ are all analyzed as “coordinating conjunctions” in traditional grammars.14 The first two occur joining NPs, as in [32] Vou convidar Samuel e Clara. ‘I am inviting Samuel and Clara’ [33] Vou convidar Samuel ou Clara. ‘I am inviting Samuel or Clara’

but the other two cannot coordinate constituents: *Samuel mas Clara ‘Samuel but Clara’ *Samuel entretanto Clara ‘Samuel however Clara’ are not units at all. Also, the connective entretanto functions as a connector between independent sentences, and the resulting sequence cannot have a syntactic function in a larger sentence; the sequence choveu, entretanto não esfriou ‘it rained, however it did not get cooler’ cannot be inserted into a larger sentence with a syntactic function. In [34] Mamãe disse que choveu, entretanto não esfriou. ‘Mom said that it rained, however it did not get cooler’  I am not totally sure about the acceptability of the English versions; Portuguese is rather liberal in allowing the fronting of topicalized constituents. 14  Cf. Hauy (2014, pp. 804–805). 13

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it is not a constituent: que choveu ‘that it rained’ is the object of disse ‘said’, and entretanto não esfriou is coordinated to mamãe disse que choveu ‘Mom said that it rained’. Actually, some speakers seem to accept a reading where the whole sequence is the object; but even so I am skeptical about the constituent status of the sequence que choveu, entretanto não esfriou, and tend to consider it the result of anaphoric reduction, because a second subordinator can appear, as in [35] Mamãe disse que choveu, e que entretanto não esfriou. ‘Mom said that it rained, and that however it did not get cooler’

In any case, all speakers accept the nonconstituent reading in [34], which still calls for a different feature for entretanto. The list of coordinators is not too extensive, but it still needs careful study to make explicit all the features involved, as well as their distribution among the items. For the moment being, I adopt the definition of coordinator given earlier, which excludes some of the traditional “coordinating conjunctions”. This diversity in grammatical behavior is not usually recognized, and grammarians tend to treat all “coordinating conjunctions” as if it were a homogeneous group. Thus, Pavón Lucero (1999) gives as one feature of coordinators that they can take as members of the coordination constituents at a level inferior to the clause. (Pavón Lucero 1999, p. 622)

and we have just seen that this is not true of all coordinating conjunctions, at least if one accepts the traditional list.

11.3 Functional x Predicating Prepositions Prepositions are often distinguished in two groups: functional and predicating (or lexical). Predicating prepositions are those that mark thematic relations, while functional ones apparently have no semantic function, being the result of idiosyncratic features of the verb. Whatever thematic relation the complement may have is, with these prepositions, a result of verb valency, and the preposition is present by force of a syntactic requirement.

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While recognizing that the difference exists, I would like to suggest that it is not a dichotomy, and that “functional” and “predicating” are functions, not classes; and we can actually refer to “more” and “less” functional or predicating prepositions, this gradation being expressible in terms of features. That is, it is incorrect to speak of functional and predicating prepositions: often, the same item can have either property according to the construction it occurs in. We may add that purely functional prepositions do not seem to exist, while purely predicating prepositions are numerous. As an example, take the preposition de in the following sentences: [36] Papai chegou de Manaus. (Source) ‘Dad came from Manaus’ [37] Eu desconfio desse grupo. (Stimulus) ‘I mistrust this team’ [38] Jaime apanhou de Vanessa. (Agent) ‘Jaime took a beating from Vanessa’ [39] Jaime se aproximou de Vanessa. (Goal) ‘Jaime came close to Vanessa’

In [36] de marks the Source, and this seems to be one of its prototypical roles; actually, there are indications that de is the most frequent mark of this role. In [37] we have de signaling the Stimulus; this is a less frequent role for phrases introduced by this preposition, although it occurs with a few other verbs, like arrepender ‘repent’, and gostar ‘like’. Now the role Agent, signaled by de as in [38], occurs only with the one verb apanhar ‘take a beating’; and also Goal, as in [39], which appears with de in only one verb in the language, aproximar ‘come close’. In view of these facts (which are typical enough), it becomes clear that being functional or predicating is not a property of the preposition, but rather of the construction in which it occurs. In [36] de NP is assigned its role (Source) by the action of a general rule, which states that this is a prototypical role of this item; it depends on the preposition, which is then predicating. But in [38] and [39] the role is necessarily assigned by reference of the particular verb in the sentence (respectively apanhar ‘take a beating’ and aproximar ‘come close’); in these sentences, assignment

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depends only on the valency of each verb, and the preposition here is functional. The preposition de cannot, then, be classified as functional or predicating, in the traditional way these terms are understood. We find cases where the preposition clearly determines the thematic relation of the constituent, and cases where it seems to have no relevance, being only a syntactic requirement. The latter situation occurs with some prepositions, not with others, and the number of verbs involved in the requirement varies. For instance, de marks the role Instrument in [40] Vovô encheu a casa de crianças. ‘Granpa filled the house with children’

This occurs with several verbs, like encher ‘fill’, alagar ‘flood’, sujar ‘dirty’, vestir ‘dress’, enfeitar ‘ornament’, and some others. But with other verbs, like pintar ‘paint’, the Instrument must appear with com, never with de: [41] Pintei a parede com tinta branca / *de tinta branca ‘I painted the wall with white paint’

The phenomenon, then, while real, cannot be described as a simple dichotomy functional/predicating, but admits of several degrees of lexical extension. Because of facts like these, some linguists have suggested that some prepositions have no meaning at all. For instance, The preposition di, when connecting two nominals, expresses a relation between the two nominals, a relation which at the cognitive content level is unspecified and becomes specified only by having recourse to context. (Castelfranchi and Parisi 1980, p. 71)

They give the following examples: [42] Ho visto un bicchiere di vetro. ‘I saw a glass cup’ [43] Ho visto un bicchiere di vino. ‘I saw a wine cup’

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and here, indeed, we need some kind of cognitive filtering to know that in [42] di NP refers to the material of the cup, and in [43] to its content. Actually, [42] can refer to a cup full of glass, and [43] to a cup made of (frozen) wine, but these are unlikely situations, and are therefore excluded in normal circumstances. On the other hand, in both cases the di NP phrase has a clear semantic function, namely reference restriction. Moreover, the presence of di is in opposition to the possible presence of other prepositions, say senza ‘without’, which would yield ho visto un bicchiere senza vino ‘I saw a cup without wine’, and the difference here does not depend on cognitive filtering, but rather on semantic properties of the prepositions involved. It remains then true that di has a semantic content; this content also applies to most other prepositions, and is therefore somewhat rarefied, but it is not null. It may be noted that in Italian di is not a mark of Source: the language has a special preposition for that, namely da (‘from’). The thematic potential of Portuguese de is, then, more extensive than that of Italian di; and in certain cases it is clearly the mark of a thematic relation, namely Source. Finally, one may ask if purely functional prepositions exist—that is, prepositions that never mark semantic roles by themselves, but are, in all their occurrences, a result of syntactic requirement. I tend to answer in the negative, and believe that all prepositions can be predicating, given the right context. This seems to be true even with the preposition a, which very often appears without any discernible meaning; nevertheless, it is a prototypical mark of Goal with most verbs. On the other hand, purely predicating prepositions—those that are marks of a thematic relation in all of their appearances—are numerous: sem ‘without’ is an example, and also all composite prepositions, like a respeito de ‘about’, depois de ‘after’, and so on. No verb requires the presence of any of these in their complements. Prepositions in functional context can indeed be said to convey no meaning: the thematic relation expressed by the construction is defined in the diathesis, or in some cases provided by default, so that the presence of the preposition is, semantically speaking, superfluous—which, of course, does not mean that they are themselves superfluous, as long as saying *she looks you remains unacceptable.

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11.4 Connectives and Verb Mood Another feature that distinguishes connectives is the mood they require in their sentential complements. This is a well-known phenomenon, and all we need here is a few examples: [44] Quando você abre/*abra a porta indic subj     ‘when you open the door’ [45] Caso você *abre/abra a porta indic subj     ‘if you open the door’

In these sentences mood is in complementary distribution: quando requires indicative forms in the verb it governs, and caso requires subjunctive (unlike prepositions, no subordinator accepts an infinitive complement).15 This difference does not seem to result from semantics: the connective se ‘if ’, although a synonym of caso, patterns like quando ‘when’ as far as mood requirement is concerned: [46] Se você abre/* abra a porta indic subj ‘if you open the door’

This suggests that each connective contains features determining which mood it requires in a subordinate verb. This applies to traditional conjunctions and also to prepositions, at least those that can govern sentential phrases: they make requirements about the mood of the subordinate verb. With some prepositions, the verb may appear in subjunctive, indicative or infinitive form:  Quando takes the so-called future subjunctive (quando você quiser ‘whenever you want’), but it has already been shown that this form is not a subjunctive at all, but a second form of the future indicative (Perini 1978). 15

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[47] Depois que o cachorro coma subj ‘after the dog eats’ [48] Depois que o cachorro come indic ‘after the dog eats’ [49] Depois do cachorro comer16 infinit ‘after the dog eats’

In spite of identical glosses, these constructions are not all perfect synonyms: [47] includes the presupposition that the dog in fact eats, while the other two denote possibilities. These distinctions are not very evident for all speakers, mostly because the indicative/subjunctive opposition in such cases is not always respected; the acceptability judgments given here are valid for slightly formal spoken language. As seen, all three moods can occur when the governing connective is depois ‘after’. This is not true of all prepositions, as shown in the examples: [50] Antes que o cachorro coma subj ‘before the dog eats’ [51] * Antes que o cachorro come indic ‘before the dog eats’ [52] Antes do cachorro comer infinit ‘before the dog eats’

With antes, the indicative does not occur. And with conforme ‘as, according to’ the infinitive is unacceptable:

 In this sentence grammarians often insist in writing the prepositions and the article separately: depois de o cachorro comer; as this rule is not consistently observed in writing, and never in speaking, it is ignored here. 16

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[53] Conforme você queira subj ‘as you want’ [54] Conforme você queria indic ‘as you wanted’ [55] * Conforme você querer infinit ‘as you want’

We have, then, at least five classes of connectives, according to this criterian, as seen in Table 11.3. The connective is not, certainly, the only factor governing the mood of subordinate clauses: there are also semantic factors, as seen with depois in examples [47]–[49]; and there is also a kind of tense harmony, as in [56] Eu tocaria conforme ela pediu/pedisse indic      indic subj ‘I would play like she asked (me to)’ [57] Eu toquei conforme ela pediu/*pedisse indic      indic  subj ‘I played like she asked (me to)’

The semantic element at work here is, I believe, the hypothetical reference of tocaria ‘would play’, as against the factual reference of toquei ‘played’. The latter is incompatible, in this context, with a subjunctive in the subordinate. This illustrates the complexity of the matter; but since our concern here is just the taxonomy of connectives, I limit myself to these suggestions for further research.

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Table 11.3   Connective classes according to mood in the subordinate verb quando ‘when’ se ‘if’ caso ‘if’ antes ‘before’ conforme ‘as; according to’ depois ‘after’

Subjunct

Indic

Infin

− − + + + +

+ + − − + +

− − − + − +

11.5 Summary As a summary, let us bring together all the nine features seen in this chapter, applying them to a sample of four items, as given in Table 11.4. Table 11.4 partially describes the grammatical behavior of these items. Speaking Portuguese presupposes the proper handling of all these features, plus several others. This sample includes four items, all with different functional potentials; note in special the wide potential of até, compared with the much more restricted quando ‘when’. But the latter has other possibilities in its potential, as for instance occurrence in construction with a qualifying item, as in [58] Esse jogador, quando motivado, tem bom rendimento. ‘this player, when motivated, has a good performance’

This very small sample should be enough to show the complexity of this set of words. Here again we are not dealing with fine, subtle points of grammar, but with features that cannot be ignored in the everyday usage of the language. If one reverses any of the signals in Table  11.4, clear unacceptability results: for instance, *antes que chegou is unacceptable, although antes que chegasse ‘before (he) came’ is fine; *quando que chegou does not work, unlike quando chegou ‘when (he) arrived’, and so on. Quando ser (i.e., with infinitive) is OK, but only in interrogative context: quando ser educado? ‘when (should one) be polite?’—this would require a separate feature. There are still details not taken into account in the table;

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Table 11.4   Grammatical behavior of some connectives

como antes de até quando

~(que S) ~(NP)Cn ~(Inf)Cn Cn

~(S) Cn

Prof VMod Subjunc Indic Infin

+ + + −

+ − − −

− − + −

– + + −

– + + −

− + + −

− + + −

+ – + +

– + + –

the basic point, however, holds: complexity is high, and we are barely beginning to study it.

11.6 Relative Constructions Relative constructions17 include a connective which has a function in the subordinate clause, plus, at the same time, anaphoric reference to an NP head in the main clause; the whole construction is an NP, and can be a subject, object, and so on in the main clause. An example is [59] [Aquele peixe que você comprou]NP está na geladeira. ‘that fish that you bought is in the fridge’

The relative que in [59] has the following features: • anaphoric reference (in Portuguese, always to the preceding nominal, here peixe ‘fish’); • introductory mark of an adjective phrase (que você comprou ‘that you bought’); • subject function relative to the subordinate verb (comprou ‘bought’). The first two features are present in all cases of relatives; the third alternates with other functions, namely object or complement of a preposition. The relative present in [59], que, has no other features; but in certain cases a distinction between human and nonhuman reference is kept, and  Called in traditional grammar “adjective constructions”; this is actually a better term, but I keep “relative” because it is more usual in linguistic works. 17

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in such cases the relative quem ‘who(m)’ is used for reference to human entities. This relative only occurs, in Portuguese, when the relative construction is introduced by a preposition, as in [60] O pescador de quem você comprou o peixe é meu tio. ‘the fisher from whom you bought the fish is my uncle’

Consequently, we need an additional feature, namely: • [Human], agreeing with a corresponding feature in the antecedent nominal. This seems to be the only item for which the feature [Human] has grammatical relevance in Portuguese. The four features given earlier are all restricted to the relatives que and quem: the first three are positive marks for both items, and the last one is positive for quem only. There is another relative, o qual ‘which’, occurring after prepositions, and without prepositions only as a nonrestrictive modifier: [61] O pescador do qual você comprou o peixe é meu tio. ‘the fisher from whom you bought the fish is my uncle’ [62] Aquele edifício, o qual foi danificado pelo furacão, tem quatro andares. ‘that building, which was damaged by the hurricane, has four floors’

O qual, unlike other relatives, varies in gender and number to agree with its antecedent; thus, [67] might start as a pescadora da qual você comprou o peixe… ‘the (female) fisher from whom you bought the fish…’, and correspondingly das quais if the antecedent is both feminine and plural. We need, then, another two features, namely • [Feminine] • [Plural] both agreeing with a corresponding feature in the antecedent nominal.

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Finally, there is a relative that refers to a locative complement of the subordinate clause, as in [63] A casa onde eu morei hoje é um museu. ‘the house where I lived is a museum nowadays’

This relative can be preceded by a preposition: [64] A ilha para onde/por onde/de onde nós fugimos se chama Trindade. ‘the island to which/through which/from which we escaped is called Trindade’

These examples show how complex is this comparatively small area of the lexicon, and provide additional illustration of the complex nature of the feature system necessary in the description of the language.

11.7 Connectives: Language and Cognition Connectives provide examples of the interplay between language and world knowledge involved in the construction of cognitive representations (CRs), and, consequently, reveal details of the limits of the language. In Sect. 6.2.2 we saw how the preposition com ‘with’ receives its thematic relation by reference to contextual factors, as in the examples [65] Vou para o Rio com minha irmã. (Company) ‘I am going to Rio with my sister’ [66] Vou para o Rio com meu carro novo. (Instrument) ‘I am going to Rio with my new car’ [67] Vou para o Rio com muita pressa. (Manner) ‘I am going to Rio in a hurry [lit.: with much haste]’

In some cases, we saw that extralinguistic knowledge is decisive to solve ambiguities, as in

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[68] Joaquim viajou com quatro cachorros. ‘Joaquim traveled with four dogs’

where the dogs are Company or Instrument, the latter if we understand Joaquim in an Arctic environment, using a dog-drawn sledge. Extralinguistic factors are crucial in the interpretation of several prepositions. For instance, de has many possible meanings (thematic relations) when introducing a modifier in the NP: just compare casa de pedra ‘stone house’; casa de Pedro ‘Pedro’s house’; aula de linguística ‘linguistics class’; professor de linguística ‘linguistics teacher’; barulho de motor ‘engine noise’; capital da Grécia ‘capital of Greece’, and so on. All these examples have one semantic feature in common, namely “reference restriction”, which I have been notating as the feature [Q] (Sect. 4.5.1). But of course one understands a lot more than that in any of these phrases, and there is no way we can tie the whole interpretation of all cases to grammatical factors, which do not vary from example to example. Here, again, we must have recourse to world knowledge: professor de linguística cannot mean “a teacher made up of linguistics”, or “a teacher who is the property of linguistics”, simply because these cognitive representations do not make enough sense. We must take into account the schema TEACHER, which includes information like “person who teaches something”; “something” stands for a variable, which can be filled in by LINGUISTICS, and this yields a well-formed cognitive representation.18 De is admittedly an extreme example; but this kind of complexity can be observed to some degree with most prepositions. A study of the thematic potential of prepositions, and the way it is complemented with world knowledge, is urgently needed. On the other hand, there are limitations based on the linguistic features of the preposition. De, a prototypical mark of Source, cannot express the Goal, except with the one verb aproximar ‘come close’, as in [69] O cachorrinho se aproximou da menina. ‘the puppy came close to the girl’19

 These constructions with de often correspond to English two-noun constructions: stone house; in other cases English makes use of prepositions, most frequently of: the capital of Greece. 19  In Spanish, which is very similar to Portuguese in so many details, the verb acercarse ‘come close’ takes the regular preposition a: el perrito se acercó a la niña. 18

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And de never introduces the Knower (the “knowing entity”, according to Carvalho 2012). It can introduce an Agent with the one verb apanhar ‘take a beating’, as seen in Sect. 9.9.1; and Stimulus with the verb gostar ‘like’: [70] Eles ainda gostam de você. ‘they still like you’

Of course, no piece of world knowledge will inform that here the preposition is de – this depends, crucially, on the valency of the verb gostar ‘like’. This example shows clearly the delicate and complex linguistic and cognitive mechanism responsible for the selection and interpretation of prepositions with verb complements. Finally, and in connection with the relatives studied in Sect. 11.4, we may mention that in many cases the thematic relation of the complement expressed by the relative is added by default, since no explicit marking is present. For instance, [71] A casa que eu morei hoje é um museu. ‘the house where I lived is a museum nowadays’

The relative is que, which has no explicit thematic indication; yet it is understood as denoting the Location attached to the subordinate verb, morei ‘(I) lived’. A preposition would be apparently needed here, and it does occur in the written style: a casa em que eu morei…, but in current speech no preposition is usually present. The way to explain the presence of the ETR “location” in the CR of the subordinate clause is to allow this thematic slot to be filled in by default, considering that the schema RESIDE has as one of its variables the “location” of the residence; and also, on the syntactic side, that the verb morar requires the expression of this complement. Additional evidence is provided by other examples, where it is clear that the choice of ETR is governed by plausibility conditions. Thus, in [72] A moça que eu falei ‘the girl I spoke’

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is understood as ‘the girl I spoke about’—not, evidently, ‘the girl I spoke in’, which is cognitively implausible. And in [73] A moça que eu viajei para a Espanha ‘the girl I traveled to Spain (with)’

the ETR must be Company, ‘the girl I traveled with’. Cases like these strongly suggest that the understood ETR is inserted into the CR by default.

11.8 Complexity Revisited All this may look awfully complicated, and perhaps it is. But it portrays accurately the knowledge possessed by all speakers, and necessary for the normal use of the language. One aspect of this complexity is the variety of types of features—the features used in the several tables often differ, although they all have in common describing details of the grammatical behavior of the items concerned; and relative constructions make use of some low-mileage features of their own. The examples given above as illustration belong to everyday speech, and are normally accepted and produced by all native speakers of Portuguese. The analysis proposed for them makes use of a variety of features which are, I believe, inevitable if we are to accurately represent the facts. Complexity comes into language often because of the incidence of items whose behavior does not conform with most items in a set; this is the case of como, seen in Sect. 11.1.2. In English we have for instance the item notwithstanding, which has a semantic function similar to that of a preposition in these errors notwithstanding, but can appear after its complement NP. About such items Huddleston remarks that traditional grammars do not recognise a class of postpositions or treat prepositions as a special case of adpositions: ago […] would be an adjective, notwithstanding an adverb (it is a preposition in notwithstanding these errors) […]. (Huddleston 1984, p. 337)

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Of course, even if notwithstanding were an adverb, it would be exceptional, since it modifies an NP; but the main objection to the traditional analysis mentioned by Huddleston is that it cannot be a preposition in a particular context, for reasons given in Sect. 4.2.1. The solution here is to analyze notwithstanding as an exceptional item, having the “normal” features of a preposition, plus the possibility of occurring after its complement. Simplification and generalization may be possible, with eventual use of fewer and more general features. But I think the search for such simplification would be premature at the present moment; right now we must look for relatively concrete descriptive features, which have the advantage of being readily testable against data, with a minimum of theoretical assumptions. We have no a priori notion of how complex language structure “really” is, and any attempt at generalization must be based on observable properties such as the ones included in the tables. What constantly arises as one endeavors to describe the facts of language at a comparatively shallow level is complexity at a much greater extent than suggested by many current theories; which, in its turn, may lead to a reappraisal of our capacity to learn details, even when they are at first approach isolated facts, not derivable from general principles. The principles, of course, may well exist, and be ultimately needed for a comprehensive view of language structure and use; but one must work for them, starting from particular observations like the ones offered in this book.20 Many of these irregularities are not derivable from general principles. Here we are dealing with another detail of the boundary between language and world knowledge which, I believe, must be established, and is often tolerably clear. The fact that notwithstanding can appear after the NP is a feature of English, and the many functions of até are a feature of Portuguese; no cognitive principle can predict this kind of behavior, which must consequently be included in the grammatical component of knowledge and, ultimately, in the structure of the language.

 This is the “inductive way” I refer to in Sect. 4.8.

20

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References Bosque, Ignacio. 1989. Las categorías gramaticales: relaciones y diferencias [Grammatical categories: relations and differences]. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis. Carvalho, Janayna M.R. 2012. Valência dos verbos de conhecimento do português brasileiro [Valency of verbs of knowledge in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: M.A. dissertation, UFMG. Castelfranchi, Cristiano and Domenico Parisi. 1980. Linguaggio, conoscenza e scopi [Language, knowledge and scopes] Bologna: Il Mulino. Castilho, Ataliba T. de, ed. 2014. Palavras de classe aberta [Open-class words]. São Paulo: Ed. Contexto. Castilho, Ataliba T. de, Rodolfo Ilari, Maria Helena de Moura Neves, and Renato M. Basso. 2014. O advérbio [The adverb]. In Palavras de classe aberta [Open-class words], ed. Ataliba T. de Castilho. São Paulo: Ed. Contexto. Ducrot, Oswald. 1980. Les échelles argumentatives [Argumentative scales]. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Hauy, Amini Boainain. 2014. Gramática da língua portuguesa padrão [Grammar of the standard Portuguese language]. EDUSP: S. Paulo. Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge University Press. Ilari, Rodolfo, ed. 2015. Palavras de classe fechada. [Closed-class words] São Paulo: Contexto. Ilari, Rodolfo, Ataliba T. de Castilho, Maria Lúcia Leitão, Lou-Ann Kleppa and Renato M. Basso. 2015. A preposição [The preposition]. In Palavras de classe fechada [Closed-class words], ed. Rodolfo Ilari. São Paulo: Contexto. Pavón Lucero, María V. 1999. Clases de partículas: preposición, conjunción y adverbio [Classes of particles: preposition, conjunction and adverb]. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española [Descriptive grammar of the Spanish language], ed. Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte. Madrid: Espasa. Perini, Mário A. 1978. Sintaxe e semântica do futuro do subjuntivo [Syntax and semantics of the future subjunctive]. Ensaios de Linguística 1, UFMG, Belo Horizonte, 20–43.

12 Adverbs and Their Relatives

12.1 What Is an Adverb? An “adverb” is, even in traditional grammar, often considered a sort of wastebasket class where items of wildly different grammatical behavior are thrown together, under the common property of being morphologically invariable, and of “modifying”, or “adding a circumstance to” verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. This brings together disparate items such as não ‘not; no’, rapidamente ‘rapidly’, amanhã ‘tomorrow’, muito ‘much’, and sim ‘yes’: these would all be adverbs, distinguished by their semantics in “of negation”, “of manner”, “of time”, and so on. There are also some items which according to traditional grammar are nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, according to context. We have already seen (Sect. 4.2.1 and passim) that this is an incorrect solution; and here I illustrate how the problem can be solved in a more satisfying way—both theoretically and practically—with the use of classificatory features.1

 For English, there is a comprehensive study of adverbs in Greenbaum (1969); for Portuguese, a recent survey is found in Castilho et al. (2014); and for Spanish we have Kovacci (1999), and also an excellent set of observations in Bosque (1989, chapters 6 and 10). 1

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So-called adverbs do have features in common; but, apart from being morphologically invariable—which is also a characteristic of connectives—there is not much to show. Bosque (1989) gives a very striking example of the composite character of this “class”: Let us consider this sequence […] También ayer caminaba muy lentamente, incluso mucho más despacio. [‘yesterday [he] also walked very slowly, even much more unhurriedly’]. According to traditional criteria, the only word not an adverb in this sequence is caminaba [walked] […] Well, what do we gain by saying that all words in this sentence except one are adverbs? The grammar of incluso [‘even’], of lentamente [‘slowly’] and of ayer [‘yesterday’] have in fact very little in common. [Bosque 1989, p. 26]

Analysis by features is already present, if in embryo, in assertions like this one.

12.2 Shifting Items In the following sentence, [1] A Sheila pensa rápido.    ‘Sheila thinks quickly’

the word rápido, here ‘quickly’, adds a thematic relation (“manner”) to the verb; it also occurs as a modifier, [2] O pensamento rápido da Sheila me espanta.     ‘Sheila’s quick thinking amazes me’

This word can also occur as an NP head, but let us leave this aside for the moment. In these two sentences, traditional grammar sees an adverb in [1] and an adjective in [2]. But this amounts to confusing the function of the word in each sentence with its functional potential, which does not depend on the current context of the word, since it is part of the lexical

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item, previously stored in memory. That is, instead of saying that rápido “can be” an adverb or an adjective, we should rather say that it can be a verb modifier, as in [1], and a NP-head modifier, as in [2]. I take verb modifier (VMod) and NP-head modifier, or simply modifier (Mod) as syntactic functions, since they have different formal properties—modifiers agree with their head in gender and number, VMods do not agree; besides, a modifier occurs as one of the terms of an NP, a VMod occurs as a sentence constituent. Semantically, they add different thematic relations, which can be termed “manner” in [1] and “quality” in [2]. All this must be coded into the corresponding lexical entry, as syntactic and semantic properties of the item. Now take [3] O pensamento rigoroso da Sheila me espanta.     ‘Sheila’s rigorous thinking amazes me’

We have only substituted rigoroso ‘rigorous’ for rápido ‘quick’ in [2]. But this new word cannot appear in the construction illustrated in [1]: [4] * A Sheila pensa rigoroso.

If we want to say that Sheila thinks “rigorously”, we must use a specialized item: [5] A Sheila pensa rigorosamente.    ‘Sheila thinks rigorously’

This means that rigoroso ‘rigorous’ has a narrower functional potential than rápido, since only the latter can occur as a VMod, with the accompanying semantic features. This way we reduce the difference in grammatical behavior between these items to a difference in functional potential; allowing one of them (rápido) to shift classes has, besides its theoretical inadequacies, the descriptive inconvenient that we do not escape having to state somewhere in the grammar the difference in functions between the “adverb” rápido and the “adjective” rápido, which in our solution is automatically accounted for.

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As far as these two features are concerned, the matrix of rápido is shared by many lexical items in Portuguese, such as alto ‘loud’, baixo ‘soft (said of sound)’, bonito ‘pretty’, and many others, which occur as modifiers or as VMods without any formal changing such as adding a suffix, as happens with rigoroso/rigorosamente. No semantic correlate is known for this property, so that each item must be marked as having or not the relevant features, which may be noted [VMod] and [Mod]: rápido is [+VMod, +Mod], rigoroso is [−VMod, +Mod], and rigorosamente is [+VMod, −Mod].2 Here we encounter again the same situation as that seen for “adjectives” and “nouns” in Chap. 4 with relation to the words barulho ‘noise’, sufocante ‘oppressive’, and mexicano ‘Mexican’: a traditional dichotomy is shown to be actually composed of three classes. The way to describe this is to use features descriptive of the grammatical behavior of the items involved.

12.3 Are Adverbs a Class? It is well known that the traditional class of adverbs covers words of very diverse grammatical properties. Azeredo (2008, p. 192), while remarking that “[t]he adverb is the most heterogeneous of all word classes”, gives examples of adverbs of “time”, “intensity”, “negation”, “focussing”, and others. This classification is semantic; but the items so categorized have also widely differing syntactic features. We may begin with two of the items given as “adverbs of time”, ontem ‘yesterday’ and antes ‘before’: we have already seen in Chap. 11 that antes has features like [+(~NPCn)], [+(~que SCn)], and [+VMod]; and it is easy to see that ontem has only the last of these features, which reveals significant grammatical differences between these so-called adverbs of time. Now if we take muito ‘very; a lot’, it shares the last feature with ontem, but it also occurs in construction with a “manner” complement (i.e., in traditional terms, with another adverb), as in  In the case of rigorosamente ‘rigorously’, the feature may be derived from the presence of the suffix, -mente ‘-ly’; in fact, all words bearing this suffix are marked [+VMod], and none is [+Mod]. English -ly is less consistent, and also marks [+Mod] words, for example, likely.

2

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[6] O bombeiro fez o serviço [muito competentemente].     ‘the plumber did his job very competently’

a function which neither antes nor ontem can have. Now, the “adverb of negation”, não ‘not; no’, also has a different distribution. It can, typically, appear in construction with a verb, adding the semantic ingredient “negation”, which can be paraphrased as “it is not the case that”: [7] O bombeiro não apareceu.     ‘the plumber did not show up’

Here the syntax is similar to that of ontem ‘yesterday’ and antes ‘before’. But não also occurs in other, very different, contexts; for instance, in construction with a nominal: [8] Os não médicos têm essas ideias ingênuas.     ‘the nonphysicians have these naive ideas’

or alone in the utterance: [9] – O bombeiro já chegou?       – Não.     ‘Has the plumber already arrived?    No.’

or, still, with mas ‘but’, in contexts like [10]  O rapaz conseguiu não um emprego, mas um trabalho temporário.     ‘the young man got not a job, but a temporary work’

Compare also não with sim ‘yes’, which is equally given as an adverb, but has a possibly unique set of features, totally different from that of não. As for “adverbs of focussing”, Azeredo gives até, which has a highly idiosyncratic set of features, already illustrated in Chap. 11 (Table 11.2).

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Another feature that sets some “adverbs” apart from others is the scope, partially reflected on the freedom of syntactic position. Thus, gravemente ‘seriously’ occurs in construction with adjectives, as in [11] O velhinho estava gravemente doente.     ‘the old man was seriously ill’

Compare with infelizmente ‘unfortunately’, which seems to occur in construction with a whole sentence, as in [12] Infelizmente, acho que esse político é corrupto.     ‘unfortunately, I think that this politician is corrupt’

Unlike gravemente, which must appear contiguous to the item it adds a circumstance to, items like infelizmente enjoy a great freedom of occurrence in the sentence. Infelizmente can appear in most points between the major constituents of the sentence: [13] * Gravemente, o velhinho estava doente./* O velhinho, gravemente, estava doente. [14] Acho, infelizmente, que esse político é corrupto.     ‘I think, unfortunately, that this politician is corrupt’ [15] Acho que esse político é corrupto, infelizmente.     ‘I think that this politician is corrupt, unfortunately’

Traditional adverbs can be found in construction with, and adding a semantic contribution to, verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, and also NPs, as in the following examples: [16] Carolina canta bem. (+ verb)    ‘Carolina sings well’ [17] Esse livro é incrivelmente bom. (+ adjective)     ‘this book is incredibly good’

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[18] Carolina canta muito bem. (+ adverb)     ‘Carolina sings very well’ [19] Vou chamar apenas meus melhores amigos. (+ NP)     ‘I’m calling only my best friends’

But bem or incrivelmente cannot occur in construction with an NP. As a final observation, some “adverbs” can be introduced by a preposition, others cannot:3 [20] Por agora, estão encerrados os trabalhos     ‘for now, the work is ended’ [21] Desde cedo já havia compradores de ingresso.     ‘since early there were already ticket buyers’ [22] […] as promessas de sempre.     ‘the promises of always’

whereas other items of this supposed class, like apenas ‘only’, incrivelmente ‘incredibly’, assim ‘thus’, and several others, do not occur with prepositions. There is no room here for a comprehensive analysis of so-called adverbs, with the functional potential of each. But it should be clear by now that this is no “class” in any useful sense. All these items have a few features in common—they have no inflection, therefore do not agree; and their semantic contribution may perhaps be brought together as including some kind of “circumstance”, although this feature is still to be defined. But the differences are more impressive; and splitting the class of adverbs into smaller classes is not a real solution, because of the occurrence of cross-classification: muito ‘very’ can occur only with an adjective or a verb; infelizmente ‘unfortunately’ with a sentence, an adjective, or a verb; apenas ‘only’ with a sentence, an adjective, an NP, or a verb; nunca ‘never’ with an adjective, an NP, or a verb, but not with a sentence:

 Examples from Bechara (2009).

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Table 12.1  Grammatical behavior of some “adverbs” (in construction with)

Adj

S

NP

V

muito ‘very’ infelizmente ‘unfortunately’ apenas ‘only’ nunca ‘never’

+ + + +

−

− −

+ + + +

+ + −

+ +

[23] Uma parede nunca pintada     ‘a never painted wall’ [24] Podemos eleger qualquer cidadão, nunca aquele idiota.     ‘we can elect any citizen, never that idiot’ [25] Você nunca vai conseguir esse emprego.     ‘you’ll never get that job’

These examples are sufficient to show that a classes-within-classes system cannot account for the behavior of this set of items. I list these four items in Table 12.1, with the features describing possibility of construction with an adjective (i.e., a Q item), a sentence, an NP, and a verb. As seen, if we take these four features, the four items are all different among them. We are far from the conception of an adverb simply as a word that can “modify a verb, an adjective, or another adverb”.

12.4 Improper Derivation We saw in Sect. 4.2.1 that words that behave like more regular members of more than one class are said to be “improperly derived”—as English round, according to Jespersen (1924), Portuguese amigo ‘friend; friendly’, and actually many others. One case of so-called improper derivation are words like claro ‘clear(ly)’, which occur in sentences like [26] O diretor falou claro.     ‘the dean spoke clearly’ [27] Esse documento não está claro.     ‘this document is not clear’

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12  Adverbs and Their Relatives  Table 12.2  “Adverbial” and “adjective” use of some items

claro ‘clear(ly)’ claramente ‘clearly’ obscuro ‘obscure’ bem ‘well’ bom ‘good’

Mod

VMod

+ −

+ +

+

−

−

+

+

−

Traditional analysis has it that claro is an adverb in [26], an adjective in [27]; but we already saw that a word cannot belong to more than one class, for good theoretical reasons, argued for in Sect. 4.2.1. Instead, cases like claro are to be analyzed as words with a particularly complex functional potential. The properties involved are “occurring in construction with an NP head”, and “occurring in construction with a verb”, respectively [Mod] and [VMod] (Table  12.2). We can then characterize the grammatical behavior of these items in a pretty simple way. All three possibilities4 are present; therefore, these five items must be placed in three classes; but, of course, only as far as these two features are concerned. This is why the table is a more adequate way to present the facts than the statement that some of these items “can be” adjectives, others “adverbs”, still others “adjectives or adverbs”. The fact that good definitions of these “classes” are not available increases the complication. The table does not show classes like “adverb” and “adjective” as wholes, but marks each item according to features: here, the possibility of occurring in construction with an NP head or with a verb. Other features are irrelevant for the present descriptive objective (see Sect. 4.5.8). As we saw, this is the way grammatical rules apply, by selection of some features and disregard of others. This phenomenon permeates all areas of grammar; I give additional examples in Chap. 13. For the moment, suffice it to observe that what relates the uses of claro in [26] and [27] is not derivation (proper or improper), but the particular set of functional features that are associated with this word.  I exclude “all minus” [−, −], which does not apply to our items.

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12.5 Nouns, Adjectives, and Adverbs Terms like “adjective”, “noun”, and “adverb” are often used as a designation of functions, instead of classes: only this explains the occurrence of assertions like “claro in [27] is an adjective”. And when a dictionary gives claro as an adjective, it usually adds the information that it “can also be” an adverb, and additionally a noun, as in [28] O claro da manhã me acordou.     ‘the morning light woke me up’

We know by now that classes and functions must be strictly distinguished; and we might have to decide how to use these designations. But since they are too entrenched in normal grammatical terminology to be used without the danger of misleading the readers, I opted to abandon them entirely, except as informal abbreviations. I use instead some features which describe functions; and, whenever rigor is called for, the classification of each item is given as a bunch of these features: for instance, claro is [+R, +Q], veloz ‘quick’ is [−R, +Q], and velocidade ‘speed’ is [+R, −Q]. I would like to observe that [+R, +Q] items such as claro are very numerous in Portuguese; and, besides, there seems to be a tendency to shift the marking of items [−R, +Q] and [+R, −Q] to the more inclusive [+R, +Q]. As for the “adverbial” use exemplified by claro ‘clear(ly)’in [26], let us improvise by using the feature [VMod], so that the grammatical behavior of claro, in the details in question, ends up being described as [+R, +Q, +VMod]; veloz ‘quick’ and velocidade ‘speed’ will have [−VMod] added to their description. It must be understood that these features, [R], [Q], and chiefly [VMod], are abbreviations, useful for our current discussion, but definitely to be further investigated and detailed. Thus, [R] refers to the referential potential of a unit—actually, always an NP; this is tolerably precise, as far as the notion of reference is made clear. The feature [Q] stands for “reference-restrictive”; it does not coincide with the traditional notion of adjective, as shown in actual analysis, partly because units in the same syntactic function often do not restrict reference, as in a elegante atriz ‘the elegant actress’, not put in contrast with nonelegant ones, but simply with an added quality.

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Now, the feature [VMod] is the most shamelessly heterogeneous of the three, and is definitely in need of extensive examination. Some work has been done, for instance in Greenbaum (1969), Bosque (1989), Ilari (2015), and a host of other studies, which still wait for proper integration into a general panorama. For the moment, let us be content with a very approximative notion, as the “addition of a circumstance to the verbal schema”, where “circumstance”, instead of being defined, is only exemplified as “manner”, “time”, “location”, and so on, all descriptive of thematic relations. Note that this conception is limited to items in construction with verbs, while we have seen that so-called adverbs also occur in construction with qualifiers and referentials. In such cases, I tend to believe that the so-called circumstance, whatever its content, has the function of restricting the scope of the event or state described by the verb. For instance, in [29] O diretor falou claro.     ‘the dean spoke clearly’

we refer to an event and restrict it, so that one understands not only that the dean spoke, but that, of all possibilities, he spoke clearly. If so, then, the [+VMod] item has a sort of parallel semantic function to [+Q] ones; but we must keep in mind that this is only one of the many so-­called adverbial contributions to the meaning of a sentence. Here we have to accept limiting the feature [VMod] to this particular semantic use, in wait for the definition of other features. This leaves us without a good definition of “adverb”, be it a function or a class; at most, it provides a first step in the task of finding such a definition.

References Azeredo, José C. de. 2008. Gramática Houaiss da língua portuguesa [Houaiss grammar of the Portuguese language]. São Paulo: Publifolha. Bechara, Evanildo. 2009. Moderna gramática portuguesa [A modern Portuguese grammar]. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira.

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Bosque, Ignacio. 1989. Las categorías gramaticales: relaciones y diferencias [Grammatical categories: relations and differences]. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis. Castilho, Ataliba T. de, Rodolfo Ilari, Maria Helena de Moura Neves, and Renato M. Basso. 2014. O advérbio [The adverb]. In Palavras de classe aberta [Open-class words], ed. Ataliba T. de Castilho. São Paulo: Ed. Contexto. Greenbaum, Sidney. 1969. Studies in English adverbial usage. London: Longmans. Ilari, Rodolfo, ed. 2015. Palavras de classe fechada. [Closed-class words] São Paulo: Contexto. Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin. Kovacci, Ofelia. 1999. El adverbio. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española [Descriptive grammar of the Spanish language], ed. Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte. Madrid: Espasa.

13 Features in Grammatical Description

Classes are mentioned in most rules of a language; the only exceptions are rules that single out individual lexical items, like irregular verbs, or exceptional plurals like children and deer. Now, if we plan to redefine classes in terms of bunches of features, we must also restate the rules in those terms. This is evidently a long task, far beyond the limits of a book like this one; however, in this chapter I have selected a few rules as examples of how we can go about this task in future grammatical description. In this section I refer to “rules”, but they are not necessarily rules in the usual sense, since they include compatibility constraints, and possibly other kinds of devices. To avoid discussing formal aspects of the grammar, though, I will speak all the time of rules.

13.1 Syntactic Functions in the Sentence Lexical items are associated with features that describe their grammatical behavior; they also have other features, which are grammatically irrelevant. Among the former we have [1st person], associated to the item I, as

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opposed to she and father, which are “third person”.1 Among the latter, father is [family member], and she is [feminine]; these features are of course essential for comprehension, but they are not necessarily relevant for grammatical description: English and Afrikaans do well without making grammatical use of them. In other languages it may be different: for instance, in Italian padre ‘father’, being a [family member], does not take the article before a possessive (mio padre ‘my father’/*il mio padre, cf. il mio libro ‘my book’). Thus, the grammatical relevance of features must be assessed language-specifically. A grammatical rule works on lexical items, and requires a feature match of some sort: it selects the features that are relevant for its action, and ignores the remaining ones. We saw a phonological example in Sect. 5.3, and syntactic rules work in much the same way; here I give some examples.

13.1.1 Functional Features of Lexical Items Our lexical examples will be eu ‘I’, me ‘me’, ela ‘she’, and pai ‘father’. They can be analyzed as bearers of certain features, which describe aspects of their grammatical behavior. Among these features are the following: [+R], that is, they are all potentially referential; [1p] = 1st person, for which eu, me are positively marked, she, pai negatively; [Subj] = subject, for which eu is positively marked, me negatively; for ela and pai the feature is not relevant, and these items can be marked, for practical ends, as [+Subj] since, after all, they can occur as subjects; [Obj] = object, for which me, ela, and pai are marked positively, eu negatively. All of these are pretty commonplace aspects, easy to check against data. For instance, all four items are potentially referential, and

 Analyzed in Sect. 10.6 as [–1st person,—2nd person].

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Table 13.1  Some grammatical features of four nominals eu ‘I’ me ‘me’ ela ‘she’ pai ‘father’

R

1p

Subj

Obj

+ + + +

+ + − −

+ − + +

− + + +

correspondingly can occur as NP heads. Ela and pai are third person, as seen by the particular verb form they select; eu is first person, since it selects a different verb form from the preceding two items. As for the person of me, this criterion does not work, since this item cannot be a subject and, therefore, does not trigger verb agreement. I will mark it as 1st person nonetheless, for semantic reasons. These marks can be represented as shown in Table 13.1. The features are associated in the table with our four lexical items. Let us now see how grammatical rules take them into account for their application.

13.1.2 NP Head There must be a rule, or a similar device, that stipulates which units can be an NP head and which cannot. And we have seen in Sect. 4.5.1 that this depends on the feature [R], which stands for “potentially referential”; therefore, all four items in Table 13.1 qualify, and can occur as NP heads, since they are all marked [+R]. But all other features in the table are irrelevant for this rule: we have NP heads of third and first persons, and both subjects and objects are NPs, with their respective heads. The rule, then, only has to mention the feature [+R] as a condition for its application to a lexical item. The ignored features, though, must still be present in these items in their dictionary state, since they may be relevant for other rules.

13.1.3 Subject and Object These functions are controlled by two specific features, because the language specifies, for some items, the possibility of being subject or object— more exactly, heads of subject and object NPs. Most items are marked

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positively for both features. Exceptions are very few; among them, two that are in Table 13.1, namely eu ‘I’ and me ‘me’. Correspondingly, eu is marked [+Subj, –Obj]; me is [–Subj, +Obj]; ela, pai follow the general rule, and are both [+Subj, +Obj].

13.1.4 Nominal Agreement In Portuguese, most nonhead elements in the NP, as well as qualifiers in other positions in the sentence, must agree with the head in gender and number, so that one says [1] Um professor cansado    ‘a tired teacher’ [2] Ela está cansada.

     ‘she is tired’ The word cansado is in the masculine in [1] to agree with professor ‘(male) teacher’, and cansada is in the feminine in [2] to agree with ela ‘she’. As is well known, this is not a reference to real sex, but rather a grammatical mark, which only holds a loose relation to biological sex. Here we may observe that the agreement (which can be seen as a selection by part of the qualifier) takes into account the feature [±Fem(inine)], disregarding all others, namely person and the features of being able to occur as a subject or an object. We must mark words like professor ‘[male] teacher’ as [–Fem], ela ‘she’ as [+Fem] in the lexicon.2 As for eu ‘I’ and me ‘me’, things get more complicated. These items, as well as você ‘you’ and vocês ‘you (pl.)’, trigger agreement in the feminine or in the masculine—and, here, the difference has to do with the sex of the referent, who is the speaker or the addressee, so that the reference is deictic. Thus, a man will say

 There are reasons to select [Fem], instead of [Masc], as the feature, since the latter is the unmarked gender; see Martin (1975). The ‘±’ mark means that the item can have either of the genders, for agreement purposes; similarly, most nominal lexemes are [±Plural], exceptions being some mass nouns (always singular) and some pluralia tantum items like férias ‘vacation’ (always plural). 2

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[3] Eu estou cansado.    ‘I am tired’

but a woman will say [4] Eu estou cansada.    ‘I am tired’

Correspondingly, você está cansada is adequate when one addresses a woman, and so on. In these conditions, gender assignment depends, of course, on nongrammatical factors. But the language must offer both possibilities, and I represent this by marking these items as [±Fem].3 We may then complete the table as Nominal agreement takes into consideration only the feature [Fem] (plus singular vs. plural, not included in the table); [1p], [Subj], and [Obj] are irrelevant as far as this rule is concerned.

13.1.5 Verbal Agreement When any of the words in Table 13.2 which are marked [+Subj] occurs as a subject—or, more precisely, when they occur as the head of a subject NP—they enter into an agreement relation with the verb:

Table 13.2  eu, me, ela, pai eu ‘I’ me ‘me’ ela ‘she’ pai ‘father’

R

1p

Subj

Obj

Fem

+ + + +

+ + − −

+ − + +

− + + +

± ± + −

 It is a way to state that they can trigger agreement for either gender.

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[5] Eu ronco.    ‘I snore’ [6] Ela ronca.    ‘she snores’ [7] Meu pai ronca.    ‘my father snores’

Ronco is the form of the verb (roncar ‘snore’) co-occurring with a first-­ person subject, while ronca is the form co-occurring with a third-person subject. This phenomenon is parallel, basically, with what happens in English, and requires no explanation. What we may observe is that only the person feature, [1p], is relevant for the application of this rule; plus, naturally, the number feature, [Plural], which is not shown in the table or in the examples, but is relevant if the subject is nós ‘we’: nós roncamos. The subject being masculine, or feminine, and also its being able to occur as an object, is not relevant.

13.1.6 Anaphoric Reference All of these items (or the NPs they head) can be referred to by anaphoric words, traditionally termed “personal pronouns”. Of course, three of them are anaphoric nouns, and when referred to in subsequent text they are most often repeated, as in [8] Eu ronco, mas eu durmo bem.     ‘I snore, but I sleep well’

But even nonanaphoric items can be so resumed, and in this case the anaphoric must agree in gender and number with its antecedent: [9] Meu pai ronca, mas ele dorme bem.     ‘my father snores, but he sleeps well’ [10] Minha mãe ronca, mas ela dorme bem.     ‘my mother snores, but she sleeps well’

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In [9] the masculine anaphoric ele ‘he’ refers to meu pai ‘my father’, and in [10] the feminine ela ‘she’ refers to minha mãe ‘my mother’. These facts are well known, and all we have to do is note that, here again, the rule selects features: the fact that pai ‘father’ is [–1p], [+Subj], [+Obj] is irrelevant for the purposes of the anaphoric reference rule; all that counts is that this item is [–Fem] and [–Plural]. Finally, we may observe a wide variety in extension between the several features in Table  13.2: [±Fem] applies to tens of thousands of items, namely all that are marked [+R], plus (through governed gender) many that are [–R, +Q]; whereas [1p] is only present in the so-called pronouns (in the table, eu ‘I’, me ‘me’, and ela ‘she’), and [Subj] and [Obj] apply only to a small subset of personal pronouns.

13.2 Features and Classes The list of examples can be multiplied, but I think things are clear enough by now: all features included in Table 13.2 are relevant for the application of grammatical rules, and are consequently part of the grammar of Portuguese; but each rule makes its own selection of features, so that no rule of the language refers to all features of any one lexical item. Which raises the question: How are the four items in Table 13.2 to be classified? Which one goes with which other? The question makes sense, but in two ways: if we specify “in relation to rule X”, the answer will be one; now, if we consider the whole functional potential of the item the answer is different. For instance, if we want to know whether an item can be the object, then the features to observe are [R] and [Obj] – from this point of view, eu ‘I’ and ela ‘she’ are in different classes; but if we want to know whether the item can be a subject, the relevant features are [R] and [Subj], and in this eu and ela are together in a “class”. On the other hand, the full set of features of an item describes its functional potential, independently of the particular context it occurs, and this is also relevant for describing its behavior. From this point of view, all four items in Table 13.2 are different, and belong to four separate classes. But from this point of view only; we return here to the principle enunciated previously (Sect. 4.5.8), to repeat: the classification of linguistic

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units invariably depends on descriptive objectives. Consequently it makes no sense to ask, without qualification, which are the word classes of a language—a question that is asked4 in traditional grammars, and in a large part of current linguistic literature. Classes do exist, but they must be conditioned to a descriptive goal. We now know that the class an item belongs to may be ascertained in dependence of its whole functional potential, or with reference to a particular rule of the language. The answers will be different, and both are relevant for describing the way the language works.

Reference Martin, John W. 1975. Gênero? [Gender?] Revista brasileira de linguística 1 (2): 3–8.

 And answered!

4

14 Semantic Correlations and Syntactic Features

14.1 Correlations An important question, which has often been asked, is to what extent grammatically relevant features correlate with semantic factors. The traditional answer is that there is a correlation, and I tend to accept it as basically correct; but, since exceptions are many and very evident, the question remains in part unanswered. In this chapter I make some considerations, on the basis of our examples, which may hopefully help provide a small part of the answer to that question. Note first that I prefer to speak about correlations, rather than any kind of causal relation such as suggested by Levin: Verb classes […] are not primitive, but emerge from more fundamental meaning components such as manner and result […]. (Levin 2015, p. 1662)

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My option only reflects a more prudent attitude, given the present stage of description, which aims at what Chomsky (1964, p.  62) calls “observational adequacy”.1 Current views about the meaning-syntax correlation vary as to the degree of coverage they admit, some considering semantics to be one of the factors involved in classification, without exclusion of more arbitrary ones, as in […] the behavior of a verb, particularly with respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments, is to a large extent determined by its meaning. Thus verb behavior can be used effectively to probe for linguistically relevant pertinent aspects of verb meaning. (Levin 1993, p. 1) […] notional descriptions of basic grammatical categories are well within the realm of plausibility, granted an appropriate view of linguistic semantics. (Langacker 1987a, p. 53)

and some apparently assuming that all classification (at least in a specific area of the structure) can be derived from semantic factors, as The expectation […] is that the syntactic (and morphological) facts of a language will be motivated by semantic aspects and that they can be exhaustively described by means of symbolic structures. (Taylor 2002, p. 29; his italics)

and Malchukov et al.’s comment that Levin’s (1993) book shows that a semantic classification of verbs can be achieved through applying syntactic diagnostics. (Malchukov et al., internet, p. 1)2

 Causality is a much more obscure notion, studied (in a typically philosophical manner) by Itkonen (1983). 2  To be fair, Malchukov et al. may be referring only to heuristic resources, not to causality. 1

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Of these authors, Levin is the one who has a most satisfactory corpus of data to show in support of her position. But she only offers somewhat vague assertions, without quantification, which to my mind would be necessary if we are to reach a more rigorous analysis. In any case, I doubt that any linguist takes seriously the idea of a total correlation between meaning and syntax, except in some relatively restricted domains. And the task ahead is to survey the grammar and the lexicon in order to identify such domains, mapping the occurrence of correlation in the whole of the structure. In this chapter I examine a few examples, taken mostly from the area where I have done most work, verb valencies. In this as in many other areas of taxonomy, the evidence is that meaning-syntax correlations are frequent and certainly suggestive; but they are usually accompanied by cases where no such correlation can be seen, and that must consequently be analyzed as idiosyncrasies. In the former case rules can be stated that provide the language learner with shortcuts and generalizations; in the latter case, no such generalizations are possible, and individual examples must be learned one by one. This does not exclude intermediate cases, so that the only precise way to refer to this phenomenon is by using quantification—and consequently, to my mind at least, distinctive features. Here, as in so many other points of the description, we draw the line between purely linguistic, mixed cognitive-­ linguistic, and purely cognitive phenomena without a priori assumptions, and ready to tackle a high degree of complexity. The examples I know lead to the conclusion that there is a tendency toward meaning-syntax correlations; but it is countered by several other still little-known factors. Regularity is overlaid with liberal portions of idiosyncrasy, and for the moment being, all we can do is chart the facts as they appear.

14.2 Syntactic Function and Semantic Role I know of no cases where the syntactic function of an NP allows for a reliable, exceptionless prediction of its semantic role: subjects admit a wide variety of roles, and objects are also quite liberal in this respect. But there seem to exist negative entailments, the best-known of which is the one that stipulates that an NP object cannot be an Agent. This works

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for English and for Portuguese as well, and is one of the presumably few cases in which a syntactic function correlates, if negatively, with a semantic role. Now, things look brighter when one looks for cases where semantic role predicts syntactic function. The first example is the prototype role, already seen, namely Agentsubject, which works for almost all constructions (about 97% of all constructions involving an Agent). Even if it is not categorical, it is evidently relevant, and most certainly is learned as part of the structure of the language (see example in Perini 2015, ­section 4.3.2). Another example is given in Carvalho (2012) who, in the course of her investigation of verbs of knowing, found that in Portuguese the Knower is always coded as the subject. She defines verbs of knowing as […] those [verbs] that make an assertion about the state of information in memory. (Carvalho 2012, p. 53)

We have then another rule, this one apparently categorical, which can be stated as Knowersubject. And we have also several rules that refer to the semantic roles signaled by connectives (see several examples in Chap. 11). Here we have an expected phenomenon, that is, meaning is determined by the presence of specific lexical items (e.g., prepositions). In most cases, however, it is not the case that syntactic structure and meaning are in correlation, except indirectly. Yet, some interesting total and partial generalizations can be found, for instance: • There are relatively few cases of a Patient expressed by a prepositional phrase; among these cases is the complement of bater ‘beat; spank’ as in [1] Esse cretino bateu no meu cachorro. ‘this jerk beat my dog’ [lit.: on my dog]

• There are very few cases of Agent in a sentential construction expressed by a prepositional phrase. Only two constructions are known to have

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this, namely the passive (with por ‘by’) and the construction illustrated by [2] Meu vizinho apanhou da mulher.     ‘my neighbor took a beating from [his] wife’

This construction occurs only with the verb apanhar ‘take a beating’. On the other hand, de NP can be an Agent in NPs, as in [3] A decisão do presidente    ‘the president’s decision’

and here it is regular. Then, the (almost total) prohibition of agentive de is context-dependent, working in sentences but not in NPs. • Another case of context-defined thematic potential is the expression of Location, which is a privilege of prepositional phrases, with few exceptions, like the verb habitar ‘inhabit’, which has the Location coded as an NP, as in [4] Os tupis habitavam o litoral.     ‘the Tupis inhabited the coast’

More normally, the Location is a prepositional phrase with em ‘in’, and some other prepositions. The above rules all relate to valencies, that is, they are limited by the properties of the governing item, most frequently the main verb of the sentence. • It is a rule that all NPs, and only they, can be referential. This rule admits of some possible exceptions, as no meu cachorro ‘(in) my dog’ in example [1],3 but it works in most cases, which shows another detail

 Perhaps not properly an exception, just a case of meaningless preposition; in this case, the animal is referred by the NP o meu cachorro, and the em is a mere syntactic embellishment required by the language. 3

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where a correlation between syntactic structure and thematic potential is present. • Now, it is not true that events and actions are always expressed by verbs (as found in many traditional grammars), because of items like cooking, help, death, and rain, which certainly may refer to events and actions and yet pattern clearly like nominals. What is particular to verbs is the ability to express tense, aspect, and person by morphological means—here we have a correlation between meaning and symbolic, not formal, features.

14.3 Valency and Semantic Similarity Another possible source of meaning-syntax correlations is the frequently claimed valential similarity of verbs having similar meanings, as in Levin’s passage quoted in Sect. 14.1. Actually, Levin is moderate, and only claims the correlation exists “to a large extent”. Whether or not it is large must be ascertained by empirical survey: as far as is known at this moment, the facts include regular and exceptional cases in unknown proportions. I give below some striking exceptions, taken from my previous books on valency (Perini 2015, 2019), as well as some of the findings in dissertations I have advised, but the actual statistics remains to be worked out. There are many examples of synonymous verbs that occur in different diatheses; we saw in Sect. 9.9.2 the case of roubar ‘rob’, ‘steal’, furtar ‘steal’, and lesar ‘defraud’, all of which depict the same basic scene, where someone illegally takes over property from someone else. One may say that all three evoke basically the same schema. Yet these verbs represent the variables in very different manners, to recapitulate: with all three, the culprit is the subject; with roubar the victim may be the object, with the stolen thing introduced by em; another construction with roubar has the stolen thing as the object, and the victim introduced by de; with furtar, only the second construction is possible; and with lesar only the first is possible. We may add assaltar ‘mug’, which has a partially similar schema (it differs in that violence is implied): here the victim is the object, as with lesar, but the stolen thing cannot appear in the sentence. Another example is abdicar ‘abdicate’, which takes de NP as a complement, and

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renunciar ‘resign’, which takes the preposition a plus an NP—although both verbs denote exactly the same event, the difference being that abdicar is appropriate in a monarchical context, and renunciar has a more general application. These examples show clearly that a one-to-one correlation between schemas, CRs, and syntactic coding is not possible in every case. The extent of this phenomenon is something to be ascertained, but examples are not difficult to find, which suggests it is widespread. Another interesting example is the trio espancar ‘spank’, bater ‘beat’, and apanhar ‘take a beating’, already mentioned in Sect. 14.2. The first patterns like usual “transitive” verbs, with the subject Agent and the object Patient: [5] O meliante espancou a menina.     ‘the scoundrel spanked the girl’

With bater the Agent is still the subject, but the Patient is introduced by em: [6] O meliante bateu na menina. (na = em+a)     ‘the scoundrel beat the girl’

And with apanhar the subject is Patient, and the Agent is introduced by de: [7] A menina apanhou do meliante. (do = de+o)     ‘the girl took a beating from the scoundrel’

Subtle differences apart, all three sentences describe the same scene, with the same participants, yet the syntactic structure, as well as the thematic assignments, is very different. Another example is the pair gostar ‘like’ and agradar ‘please’: they both denote an emotion triggered by some experience or object, but the thematic assignments are reversed, as is also the case for English like and please: [8] O público não gostou do filme.     ‘the audience did not like the film’

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[9] O filme não agradou o público. (also … ao público)     ‘the film did not please the audience’

A curious case is provided by the verb enrolar ‘wrap’, which involves an Agent, a Patient, and a Location; the verb appears in two constructions, one with the Patient as the object, and the Location introduced by a preposition, typically em: [10] Célia enrolou um lençol no corpo. (no = em+o)     ‘Célia wrapped a sheet around her body’

and another (synonymous) construction, with the Location as the object, and the Patient introduced by a preposition (em or com): [11] Célia enrolou o corpo no lençol.     ‘Célia wrapped her body with a sheet’

As seen, this example works for English wrap as well. We have then the case of enfiar ‘stick into’ and trespassar, ‘pierce through’—not perfect synonyms, but both denoting ‘cause to penetrate’, and including the same variables in the schema they evoke, namely an Agent, an Instrument and a Location, as in [12] Jorge enfiou a lança no dragão.     ‘Jorge stuck the spear into the dragon’

As seen, with enfiar the Agent is the subject, the Instrument is the object and the Location (or possibly Goal) is introduced by em. But with trespassar the Location is the object, and the Instrument is introduced by com: [13] Jorge trespassou o dragão com a lança.     ‘Jorge drove the spear through the dragon’

In the aforementioned examples, I refer to thematic synonymy; in most cases there is a difference in topic structure. And in some cases there is some meaning difference between these verbs, but they are similar enough to raise the suspicion that meaning has little to do with their

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valency differences; besides, it is hard to imagine a coherent set of factors influencing valency in these, and other, examples. I have to conclude that syntactic idiosyncrasy is responsible for the observed valential differences, and that in these cases it is simply not the case that […] verb behavior can be used effectively to probe for linguistically relevant pertinent aspects of verb meaning. (Levin 1993, p. 1)

or that […] the syntactic (and morphological) facts of a language will be motivated by semantic aspects and […] they can be exhaustively described by means of symbolic structures. (Taylor 2002, p. 29)

14.4 Classes and Semantic Type If there is a traditional view of word classes, it is that each of them has a consistent semantic character that defines it. This is approximately true in many cases; but the details are complex, not only because of the need to establish the set of features that are common to all members of a class, since traditional definitions are often extremely vague, but also because there are exceptions, which must be identified and duly interpreted. Langacker, in an article directed to the question of defining nouns and verbs, expresses his belief that […] notional descriptions of basic grammatical categories are well within the realm of plausibility, granted an appropriate view of linguistic semantics. (Langacker 1987a, p. 53)

As seen, Langacker is careful not to commit himself to a categorical position, and I think he is right on this account. In any case, this sets up a task for future research, and a long task it is, since no unique comprehensive solution is available: details must be individually worked, until a more general picture begins to emerge. Here, as so often, empirical

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surveys are needed, and description takes (for the moment) precedence over theory-building.

14.4.1 On Distinguishing Verbs from Nouns Let us now consider the opposition between verbs and nouns. Take a cognate set of words: fechando ‘closing’; fecho ‘(I) close’; fechou (he) closed’; and fechamento ‘(the) closing’. We know that the first three are analyzed as verb forms (of the verb fechar ‘close’) and the fourth is analyzed as a noun. This analysis is basically correct, but it can be improved, with the use of distinctive features. One evident difference is that some of these words are tensed, that is, they express time reference by means of their morphological structure; and, besides, they also express person, with reference to their eventual subjects: these words are fecho ‘(I) close’ and fechou ‘(he) closed’. The other two, fechando ‘closing’ and fechamento ‘(the) closing’ are not marked for tense or person. This criterion sets them apart in two groups, which however do not correspond entirely to the traditional split, according to which fecho, fechou, and fechando are verbs, and fechamento is a noun. I say ‘entirely’ because the different status of the gerund fechando is, in a way, recognized by calling it a “nominal” verb form;4 it has in common with fechamento the lack of tense and person marks. But this still leaves us without a clear distinction between verbs and nouns; the traditional use of features of person and tense is not sufficient to represent the relevant differences and similarities present in this small group of words. The definition can be approached in an indirect way, if we call a verb any member of a lexeme that includes (in some of its members) tense and person markings. This definition does not consider another characteristic, the possible presence of a particular semantic feature common to all verb forms, and only them; this is at the base of traditional definitions, and may have some useful content. Let us then consider a few additional features. A semantic feature present in all these words is a general reference to a  It would be more adequate to call it an “adverbial” form; the Portuguese gerund, unlike the similarly named English one, cannot be an NP head. 4

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“closing event”; this is a schema (CLOSE) evoked by any of these units— in other words, all four have to do with someone closing something. And in all cases both the closing and the closed entities can be expressed: [14] Uma mulher fechando o portão causou o acidente.     ‘a woman closing the gate caused the accident’ [15] Eu fecho o portão.     ‘I close the gate’ [16] A mulher fechou o portão.     ‘the woman closed the gate’ [17] O fechamento do portão pela mulher causou o acidente. (pela = por + a)     ‘the closing of the gate by the woman caused the accident’

We have so far then six features descriptive of the oppositions observed in this set of items, to summarize, (1) evocation of the schema CLOSE; (2) morphological coding of tense and person, [T&P]; (3) the Agent coded as the subject, [Ag“duration”  X>Location Passei mais de sete anos nos Estados Unidos. ‘I spent more than seven years in the United States’ C24  VSubj>Stimulus   V    a NP>Manner O armário está cheirando a mofo. ‘the wardrobe smells of mold’ C96  VSubj>Patient   Refl   V    de NP>Cause Essa mulher se cansou de você. ‘this woman got tired of you’ (Not in the Valency dictionary) VSubj>Initial.state  V    NP Honório became a werewolf. It may be interesting to explain a detail of the notation: why use ‘VSubj’ (spelled out as valential subject), instead of just ‘Subj’? The answer is that VSubj stands for three morphosyntactic configurations: (a) a subject NP and a person-number suffix: [i] Nós saímos.    we left. (b) a person-number suffix, without subject NP: [ii] Saímos.   (we) left. (c) a subject NP, without the suffix [iii] Nós saindo, vocês podem ir dormir.    we leaving, you can go to sleep      ‘(when) we leave, you can go to sleep’ All three examples contain a VSubj, although one of them does not have a subject NP. The subject-only situation occurs when the verb is in a noninflected form, such as the gerund: this situation only occurs in

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315

subordinate clauses. In English the suffix does not occur without the subject, except in anaphoric context; but Portuguese is a pro-drop language, and in certain situations we can have just the verb, as in [ii]. The reason for not distinguishing these three configurations is that there is no verb that accepts a particular complement in one of them without accepting it in all of them—that is, the difference between the three is irrelevant for valency purposes. This does not mean that the presence of the subject NP and/or the suffix is free; but it depends on grammatical or discourse factors, not lexical ones. Therefore, sentences [i], [ii] and (the subordinate in) [iii] elaborate the single diathesis. [iv] VSubj>Mover

V

If we did include the distinction in the diathesis, we would have, for all verbs, three versions of every construction, one with the subject NP and the suffix, another with the suffix only, a third one with the subject NP only—and identical in everything else. The difference between these three constructions would, of course, fail to subclassify the verbs, since all verbs would occur in all three. This is the reason for using the abbreviation ‘VSubj’, covering all three situations.



Appendix B

Agglutination of Preposition Plus Article Some Portuguese prepositions agglutinate with articles and other items. Thus, de is a mark of Possessor, as in a casa de João ‘João’s house’; but if the following NP begins with an article, de agglutinates with it, so that ‘the girls’ house’ is a casa das meninas (=de+as meninas). I give further all cases of agglutination used in the Portuguese examples in this book: Singular Plural a + o = ao a + os = aos a + a = à a + as = às de + o = do de + os = dos de + a = da de + as = das em + o = no em + os = nos em + a = na em + as = nas por + o = pelo por + os = pelos por + a = pela por + as = pelas

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Appendix C

Abbreviations and Symbols Used in This Book [+Q] potentially reference-restrictive [+R] potentially referential ~ in construction with CR cognitive representation Det determiner ETR elaborate thematic relation Mod  modifier (the property to occur in construction with an NP head) PDet  predeterminer PHMod pre-head modifier Prof profiler Qf quantifier VDM verb of directional motion VMod verb modifier (the property to occur in construction with a verb) VSubj  (valential) subject joins the members of a prototype rule

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⊃ “elaborates into” C1, C2, C4, C96, and so on arbitrary labels used to refer to diatheses as listed in the Valency dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese verbs (~Inf )Cn  the property of occurring before an infinitive, so that the sequence is not an infinitive (~NP)Cn the property of occurring before an NP, so that the sequence is not an NP ~(que S)Cn the property of occurring before que + sentence, so that the sequence is not a sentence, but an NP (~S)Cn the property of occurring before a sentence, so that the sequence is not a sentence



Appendix D

Glossary I briefly define here some terms that are not too current in the linguistic literature; all of these terms are introduced and defined at their respective points in the text (see Index). Anomalistic component 

That part of the structure of a language that cannot be described by general rules. In particular, features connected to individual lexical items, such as exceptions and diatheses. Assignment by default  Assignment of a thematic relation to a complement, made without the intermediation of grammatical rules, but by direct reference to the schema. Assignment requirement   The requirement that all eligible complements be assigned a thematic relation—that is, no thematically free syntactic complements are allowed.

X

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322  Class 

Appendix D

A set of items having the same, or similar, functional potential. This is not to be taken in absolute terms (e.g., item I belongs to class C), but necessarily in relation to a grammatical rule: item I belongs with item J as far as rule R is concerned. Classifier (vs. qualifier)   A semantic feature by which a [+Q] item restricts the reference of an NP head by adding information about not that reference, but about some other property in some way related to it, as in mechanical engineer, which does not denote an engineer who is mechanical (i.e., a robot), but one who works on mechanical devices. Cognitive representation (CR)  The final understanding of a sentence, thus called by Talmy (2000), who describes it as an “experiential complex”. The CR is a cognitive, not a linguistic, entity, and it is the aim and raison d’être of language activity. Called a “mental landscape” in Perini (2015); “scene” in Fillmore (1975) and Schlesinger (1995); and “web of knowledge” in Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980). Coordinator  A connective which joins two constructions of a class, making up a larger construction belonging to the same class. Thus, Laura and John are both NPs, and their coordination Laura and John (where and is the coordinator) is also an NP. Diathesis  A construction in which some verbs (but not all) can occur. Each diathesis splits the verbs of a language into two classes: the ones that can and the ones that cannot occur in it. An important notion because the valency of a verb is expressed in terms of the diathesis in which it can occur. Elaboration  In the way it is used here, this term refers to the relation between linguistic relations (e.g.,

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semantic roles) and cognitive ones which can be recognized as hyponyms of the former (ETRs). Thus, the role Patient can be elaborated into the ETRs “eaten.thing”, “torn. thing”, or “painted.thing”, and many others, perhaps unlimited in number. ETR (elaborate thematic relation)  The cognitive face of a thematic relation, part of the cognitive representation, as the “eaten. thing” as opposed to the linguistic relation Patient, or the “eater” as opposed to the Agent. Called “CSR” in Perini (2015). Functional potential  The set of all syntactic or semantic functions which an item can occupy: an NP, for instance, has in its syntactic potential the functions of subject and object; and in its semantic potential semantic roles such as Agent, Patient, and so on. A class is a set of items sharing an identical (or similar) potential functional. Lexeme  A set of words related among them by inflection (not derivation). Members of a lexeme have other features in common: all members of a verb lexeme, share exactly the same valency, and their semantic features are the same as found in other verb lexemes. For instance, final -s marks the third person singular in the present for all verbs of English. Modifier  A syntactic function definable as occurring after the NP head and in construction with it. Predeterminer   A term of the NP having the property of appearing necessarily at the head of the construction. Prototype   Used here in two related senses: (a) a rule that applies to a large percentage of cases; it may have exceptions, and usually does; and (b) an item that undergoes one such rule. Thus, Agentsubject is a prototype rule,

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since it applies to all sentential constructions in Portuguese except one; and work is a prototypical verb in English, since its inflection is identical to most verbs in the language. Semantic role   A thematic relation that is object of grammatical rules in the language. This sets the Agent apart from the “eater” (an ETR), because no rule of English mentions the latter. Subordinator  A connective which, added to a tensed clause, makes up an NP or an adverbial phrase. Thematic potential   The set of all thematic relations (usually, semantic roles) an item or a construction can be assigned. Thematic relation   Any one of a set of semantic features that describe the relation of a constituent and the head of its construction. Thematic relations are distinguished into semantic roles (q.v.) and ETRs (q.v.). Valency  The set of all diatheses a lexeme can occur in.

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Index1

A

C

Adjective phrase, 302, 303, 305, 306 Adverb, 257–267 diversity of properties, 260–264 and noun, adjective, 266–267 Adverbial phrase, 303, 305, 306 Agreement by anaphora, 274–275 nominal, 272–273 verbal, 273–274 Anomalistic component in language, 182–184, 187, 188 Article, use of, 61–62 Assignment of ETRs by default, 77, 137, 139 effect on subclassification of verbs, 160 Assignment requirement, 142, 143 Auxiliary, 161–163

Class continuous vs. discrete, 111–117 criteria, 153–156 defined out of context, 39 and features, 102–106, 275–276 open vs. closed, 106–108 semantic and morphosyntactic, 99–102 Classification, 9–11, 37–88 conceptions of, 12–15 by features, 57–59, 62–64, 66, 67, 71, 74–77 by objectives, 10, 77–78 of verbs, 153–164, 179–181 what to classify, 81–84 Classifiers vs. qualifier, 71 Cognitive representation (CR), 21, 22, 138, 139

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. A. Perini, Function and Class in Linguistic Description, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6

335

336 Index

Competence vs. performance, 3 Complexity, 45–46, 167–188, 253–254 Conjunction, 63–67 definition, 229 Connective, 64, 66, 67, 227–254 and cognition, 250–253 and verb mood, 244–246 Constructions of motion, 169 Coordinator, 237–240 Cross-classification, 10

of meaning vs. form, 17 in rules, 97, 269–276 of symbolization, 18 syntactic, 269–275 Form vs. meaning, 17, 277–295 correlations, 48–49, 99, 184–186, 277–279 in the NP, 206 Function vs. class, 39–42, 94 Functional potential, 40, 41

D

G

Description, 1–5 Determiner, 207–211 Diathesis, 84, 85 Distinctions linguistic vs. cognitive, 37

Gender, 216–219 agreement, 216–218 inherent vs. governed, 216–219 Grammatical distinctions, 37–39 I

E

Elaboration, 31–34, 135, 139 ETR (elaborate thematic relation), 30–31 Exception, 127, 128, 180, 182, 183, 186 Extension restriction, 304, 305 F

Features, 12, 13, 42–45 acquisition, 75–77 and classes, 275–276 coding of the Goal, 172–176 coding of the Source, 170–172, 175–176 defined in context, 39 hierarchy of, 46–48 linguistic relevance, 133–136

Idiosyncrasy, 91–95 Improper derivation, 41, 264–265 Induction, 13, 84–88 Introspection, 17, 17n1, 19 L

Lexeme, 53–56 vs. word, 79–81 Lexical item, 270–271 Light verb, 163–164 Limits of grammar, 133–137 Literal meaning, 20–35 M

Metaphor, 30 Modifier, 207–211 pre- and post-head, 211–214

 Index 

337

N

R

Nahuatl, 32 Noun phrase, 191–224 features, 297–301 inherited features, 298–301, 305–307 NP head, 193–207, 271 Np mate, 221, 222 semantics in the NP, 191 temporal reference, 299–300 Noun vs. adjective, 57, 60, 291–293

Redundancy in analysis, 144–147 Reference restriction, 58, 58n25 Referentiality, 299–300, 304 Regularity, 179–181 Relative construction, 248–250, 307 Restrictiveness, 211–213 Rule, 44, 45 and classes, 178–179 and features, 102–106, 269–275

P

Patient, 140–144 Performance vs. competence, 3 Predeterminer, 207–211 Preposition, 63–67 definition, 229 functional vs. predicating, 240–243 selection with verbs of motion, 169, 187 semantics of, 280, 281 Prepositional phrase, 306 Production vs. reception, 148–149 Pronoun, 219–223 anaphoric, 274, 275 Prototype, 12, 111–132 and classes, 118–121 and features, 127–129 rules, 118, 119, 156–161 and semantic roles, 99–102 and valency, 124–126

S

Schema, 138–139 Schematization, 31, 33 Semantic role, 30–31 vs. ETR, 30–31 regular coding, 180–181 and syntax, 279–282 Subordinator, 237 Syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic relations, 41 Syntax and semantics, 169–170, 205–207, 277–295 T

Thematic hierarchy, 101 Thematic potential, 294–295 V

Q

Quality, 76 Quantifier, 207–211

Valency, 84, 85 and meaning, 282–285 Variables, 138 core and peripheral, 147–148

338 Index

Verb of directional motion, 167–171, 185, 187 irregular, 80, 118 light, 163–164 and noun, 286–291 subclassification, 153–164 transitivity, 69, 70

valency, 69 valential classes, 67–70 W

Word, 52–56 vs. lexeme, 79–81 Word class, 37–88, 91, 95, 266, 267 and semantic type, 285–293