Portuguese non-headed sentences

[Detmar Meurers]

Hi José,

> I want to thank the suggestions about sentences like
> (1) Chuva, só no sábado
> 'Rain, only Saturday'
> This sentences are (relatively) context-free, meaningfully and well-formed and
> they aren't an ellipsis instance. Thus, they aren't present only in slogans
> and newspaper's titles, but they can occur in many situations:
> (2) a. Que tempo!
> 'What a whether!'
> (2) b. Está descansado. Chuva, só no sábado.
> 'Don't worry. It rains only Saturday'.
> So, I will try to describe expressions like (1) and (2.b) as non-head
> sentences.
> I think (but I am not sure) that if these sentences are, indeed, context-free

You seem to use "context-free" to mean something like
"out-of-the-blue utterances" or some other notion of independence
from the context of an utterance - note that this isn't the ordinary
use of context-free, so it's probably best to avoid that term.

> and non-headed, they may pose some problems to
> the HPSG grammar (eg. the Head Feature Principle, the Valence Principle,
> The Semantic Compositionality  Principle, by example.)
> Is this point of vue raisonable?

The notions you mention - headedness, compositionality,
subcategorization - are fundamental notions which are incorporated
into most current linguistic frameworks. This explains why apparent
exceptions to them (e.g. idioms, verb clusters) are of interest for
generative linguists in general, not just those working in a
particular framework. Your task therefore does not boil down to
showing that something can be anlyzed in a way that violates some
constraint of HPSG; instead you need to provide arguments for why
the construction you're interested in should be analyzed as a
non-headed construction. Once you have the empirical and conceptual
argument worked out, you can return to HPSG as a useful framework
for making empirical and conceptual work explicit and to inspect the
broader theoretical consequences of your work.

Lieben Gruß,
Detmar


--
Detmar Meurers                              Fax: Int + 614 292-8833
The Ohio State University                   Tel: Int + 614 292-0461
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