Portuguese phrases without verb

[bender at csli.stanford.edu]

Dear Jose,

I'm not sure they're entirely parallel, but I studied
verbless clauses in African American Vernacular English.
I present an HPSG analysis of them in my dissertation,
which you can get from this URL:

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~bender/dissertation/

Those clauses don't look like topic/comment structures,
though, so it will probably be most interesting to you
as a contrasting case.

-- Emily

=?iso-8859-15?q?Jos=E9=20Catarino?= wrote
>
> 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?
> 2. The structures like (1) or (2) are possible in English?
>
>
> If anybody knows of some HPSG works on this phrases, please let me know.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> José Cipriano Catarino
>


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