Eckhard Bick - VISL

(1c) [Chegou]. ('He/she/it arrived.)
A predication without a subject refers directly to the world:
(1d) [Chove]. (‘it is raining’)
(1d') [Faz frio]. (‘it is cold’)
(1e) [Leia] ! (‘Read!’),
or even a quick warning like:
(1f) Atenção, [quente] ! (‘Attention, hot!’).
If there is a subject to refer to, then what relates the predication to it, is usually - where
present - the predicate's verbal part (underlined in 1a). Therefore, the verb (or verb
chain) can be called predicator 155 (i.e. what predicates). Intransitive (1b) and ergative
(1c) verbs can completely subsume the functions of predication and predicator, and
most content verbs (action, activity, event and process verbs) are at least part of the
predication (1a). Further, modals and certain other auxiliaries (dever, querer, saber, ir
+INF, começar+a+INF, ...) might then be seen as predicators predicating a modality of
a predicate (1g), creating a new, complex predicate 156 . Copula-verbs (ser, estar, ficar,
..), however, have nearly no semantic weight of their own, and are thus pure predicators.
In these cases, the predication is averbal (verbless), as in (1h) where the predicator
estava predicates the predication doente (in the post-copula adjective/noun case
traditionally called a predicative) of the subject criança.
155 To make a distinction between what predicates and what is predicated, also adresses the problem of how to mediate
between syntactico-functional on the one side and semantico-functional distinctions on the other.
The syntactico-functional concept of predicator is primarily syntactic - it is a useful dependency hook for other
clause level constituents like subject and object, and has been recognized as what I would like to call "the small
(complement-free) VP" in traditional English PSG (as opposed to the object incorporating English “enlarged” VP and the
Romance "big VP" embracing all verb-complements - including the subject). The term predicator is inspired by the usage in
(Bache et. al., 1993), but my hierarchical left leaning dependency treatment of verb chains assigns complex predicators an
internal structure different from the one advocated by Bache et. al, based on constituent analysis with the chain's head to the
right. In particular, the dependency notation does not assign complex predicators constituent status in the same way, and
hierarchical bracketing would - without transformation - turn main verb + complements into a complex (ICL-) dependent
"inside" the auxiliary clause (cp. 4.3.1, (1))..
The concept of predication, on the other hand, is not about syntax proper, but about information structure. Thus
syntactic elements can be seen as vehicles for a predication, allowing for both "information-free" purely syntactic units (like
the copula case 1h) followed by information-bearing elements (like the predicative) and for multifunctional elements, where
there is no one-to-one relation between syntactic and semantic function (like in 1g, where the predication jointly resides in
two syntactic elements, the predicator and the direct object). My semantico-functional use of the term predication, must be
distinguished from a syntactic definition like the one employed in (Bache, 1996, p.25), where a predication is a metaconstituent
equalling the predicate minus (modal) operators, and can be identified by syntactic tests like co-ordination,
fronting and substitution (by a pro-form).
156 Notationally my parser captures this complexity by describing verb chains as a multi-layered clause hierarchy, using a
new @#ICL-AUX< tag for each new inner layer, and regarding the first verb in the verb chain, finite or not, as the
dependency head of the whole structure (cp. 4.3.1, (1)).
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