Eckhard Bick - VISL

(1g) Não [queria [comer outro bolo]]. (He wouldn't eat another piece of cake.')
(1h) a criança [estava doente] (‘the child was ill’),
Since it is semantically independent of the verb, predicational material that can
appear in copula-clauses, like adjectives, attributive nouns (comunista), place- and time
adverbials, is the most likely to appear in verbless predications. Predications like quente
in (1f) or (2b) might in fact be regarded as elliptical predicates, where the copula has
been omitted.
(2a) Bebe o chá quente! (‘Drink the tea hot!’)
(2b) Bebe o chá quando quente! (‘Drink the tea while [it is] hot!’)
(2c) *Bebe o chá quando ele quente! (‘Drink the tea while it [is] hot!’)
The agrammaticality of (2c) shows that omission of the predicator entails obligatory
omission of the subject - which could otherwise be added exploiting the verb’s number
and gender information in an anaphoric way. Therefore, quente has to be predicated
directly of a main clause entity (or of the world), - here the direct object chá. In (2a) this
is no problem, since we have the clause-level function of object complement (@OC) to
account for this phenomenon. Both @OC and the similar @SC (subject predicative
complement) and @PRED (free predicative) are obvious cases where predications are
clause-level constituents, the difference being that @OC and @SC are usually valencybound,
while @PREDs are not.
In (2b), however, quente is isolated from the main clause by - a complementiser.
Though both predicator- and subjectless, one could argue that quando quente is still a
kind of clausal entity, since it boasts a subordinator (the relative adverbial quando), that
can help establish a contextualised SOA even without the help of a predicator. Rather
than, for instance, solving the problem by calling quando in (2b) a preposition
(something which is quite common in the analogous case of the comparative como), I
would like to argue that it is still a complementiser, and that its semantic content,
temporal, spatial or comparative, is what turns quente into a contextualised SOA. Here,
the SOA is not predicated of a grammatical subject, but yet of part of its intensional
potential (conditioned by a when, where or how). Interestingly, most instances involve
adverbial complementisers and conditional conjunctions (like embora ‘though’), while
the “pure” (completive) complementiser que (‘that’), which is void of semantic content,
can not occur in this kind of (averbal clausal) construction - unless the construction is
comparative with que featuring at least anaphoric semantic content 157 (3a).
157 This is not at all a contradiction, since comparative 'que' is not completive, and could, in fact, be treated as a different
lexeme, a classification for which there is other "circumstantial evidence", both diachronic and translational (cp. 4.5.2). Thus
the two meanings 'that' (completive) and 'than/as' (comparative) of Portuguese que can be etymologically traced to two
different Latin origins, 'quod' and 'quam', respectively. The view that comparative que anaphorically "borrows" semantic
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