Eckhard Bick - VISL

castelos [castelho] N M P @A
velhos [velho] ADJ M P @N<
This way each word needs only "remember" its own immediate "upward"
dependency relation (i.e. what the word itself is dependent of), and all of a sentence's
syntactic structure can be described locally (in the form of word bound tags), - as in a
mobile, where every thread (only) "knows" exactly 2 of the mobile's many moving
parts: at one end the bar it is attached to (the head to which a dependency marker
points), and at the other the object (or bar) which it holds (the dependent, from which
the dependency marker points away). It is enough to note for every piece in the mobile
to which other piece it attaches, and one will be able to cut the whole thing into pieces,
store it in a shoe box, and reassemble it next Christmas, - without losing structural
information 128 .
While the mobile metaphor nicely captures the high degree of constituent order
mobility in Portuguese sentences, a two-dimensional shadow projection of the mobile
would yield "frozen" (dependency-) tree diagrams for individual sentences, and the
description should ultimately contain all the structural information needed to draw PSGlike
syntactic trees, too (cp. 4.6.3).
In (5), muito is located far down in the mobile, but it “knows” its 'adverbialadject-
(@>A) thread-link’ to velho. This in turn is attached leftward as a 'postnominal'
(@N