Portuguese phrases without verb

[Detmar Meurers]

Dear José,

> I am studying (apparently) non-head structures as (1) or (2), which are well
> formed in Portuguese:
> (1) Chuva, só no sábado.
> (Name, adverb, preposition+det, name)
> 'Rain, only Saturday'
> (2) Casamento, só no Verão.
> 'Marriage, only at Summer'
> These phrases doesn't seems to result of ellipsis of the verb and subject.
> I am exploring the hypothesis that they are licensed by some properties of
> the name in topic and the syntactic structure, composed only by topic and
> focus.
> I would like to put some questions:
> 1. This hypothesis is  fully compatible with the HPSG's grammar?

I'm not sure what it would mean to be compatibile with HPSG given
the vague nature of the issue and the fact that there is no uniform
HPSG approach as such, let alone one to Portugese and information
structure. But there are HPSG approaches to topic/focus structuring
that you could check out and build on, for example, the work by
Elisabeth Engdahl/Enrique Valduvi and Kordula De Kuthy. Kordula's
thesis contains a discussion of information structure in HPSG; you
can download it form her homepage at http://ling.osu.edu/~kdk/
A revised version is coming out as a CSLI book this summer.

> 2. The structures like (1) or (2) are possible in English?

What kind of discourse are these sentences embedded in?
E.g. one could have something like:

John: Hey Bill, do you want a beer?
Bill: Alcohol, never on sundays!

(Note that this supports the inference that Bill is a Republican ;-)

Or take a weather report:

Sunday, rain.
Monday, partly cloudy.

Another setting in which such reduced sentences appear are headlines.

So in order to see how your examples fit in and how they could be
interpreted theoretically, it seems important to clarify in what
kind of setting/discourse the Portugese sentences you mention can
appear. Any chance of finding them in a corpus?

Lieben Gruß,
Detmar

--
Detmar Meurers                              Fax: Int + 614 292-8833
The Ohio State University                   Tel: Int + 614 292-0461
Department of Linguistics                   E-Mail: dm at ling.osu.edu
1712 Neil Avenue, Oxley Hall     Homepage: http://ling.osu.edu/~dm/
Columbus OH 43210-1298, USA    PGP key on web page (use encouraged)

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly
one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to
suit facts." Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" (A. C. Doyle)