Eckhard Bick - VISL

(g) isso existe (até/nem (nos Estados Unidos))
(h) lutava com o inimigo, (ainda/já (com a energia da raiva))
(i) se retirou (muito (sem querer))
Such an analysis would make the resulting, larger, group hypotactic, and it would thus
no longer qualify as a PP. Since intensifier adjects project AP-hood (according to the
definition used in the last chapter), the group in (i) could be called an AP with adverbial
function, with a complex (PP-) head and an adverbial pre-adject (@>A) as modifier.
Given the predicative function of the group in (h), a similar solution might work here.
Both the enlarged groups in (h) and (i) can be fronted and focused as whole
constituents:
(h’) Era ainda com a energia da raiva, que lutava com o inimigo
(i’) Foi muito sem querer que se retirou
‘Até’ and ‘nem’ in (g), however, are different. They can operate on constituents outside
the “adpositional” range, too, like subjects and objects (‘confiava até nos Estados
Unidos’), and appear to be oddly “transparent” with respect to their supposed PP head.
Thus, PP’s cannot be focused together with modifiers like ‘até’ or ‘nem’:
(g’) ? é até/nem nos Estados Unidos que isso existe.
One possible explanation for the agrammaticality of (g’) is that ‘até/nem’ is a clause
level constituent (@ADVL), and doesn’t attach to the PP at all. In this case, however,
there should be no difference in meaning whatever the adverbial precedes the verb or
the PP:
(j) ele escreve livros até em francês. (rather than in English)
(k) ele até escreve livros em francês. (rather than just speaking French)
Another solution is to assign to “operator adverbs” the function of focus markers, which
accounts both for why they have to immediately precede their head and why they can’t
be moved along into the focus bracket of ‘é/era/foi .... que’. And since focusing is
neutral with respect to focused form, a focused PP would still be a kind of “meta-PP”.
For reasons of notational clarity, my parser needs to dependency-attach all of the
above PP-modifiers to a word, i.e. the preposition head (@>P), rather than the whole
PP. However, if we assume that all pre-adjects in PP’s behave in the same way,
dependency-wise (i.e. modify the whole PP), then there is nothing in the way of
interpreting the @>P tag differently from ordinary word-to-word dependency tags, or
filtering all intensifier and time operator @>P tags into @>A tags.
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