Portuguese non-headed sentences

[Wesley Davidson]

Hi Jose.

> I want to thank the suggestions about sentences like
> (1) Chuva, só no sábado
> 'Rain, only Saturday'
> [...]
> So, I will try to describe expressions like (1) and (2.b) as non-head
> sentences.

Do these things occur everywhere you would expect a sentence (by which I'm
guessing you mean a finite clause) to go?

For example, do they occur as the complement of verbs that select
sentential complements?

That is, is the Portuguese analogue (if there is one) of something like
"Kim thinks [rain only Saturday]" acceptable?  (And not in the
directly-quoted-speech way that "Kim thinks 'Aha!  Another cookie!'" is
acceptable...)

If not, I'd wonder why these non-head sentences don't have the full
distribution of their headed counterparts.

-Wes Davidson

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, [iso-8859-15] José Catarino wrote:

> 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
> 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?
> Thanks.
> José Catarino
>