Eckhard Bick - VISL

(8e) Estamos todos @ estamos mais ou menos
sujeitos
(8g) ... moram quase todas @A) or even a verb (7d-f @A), respectively. I have chosen the first solution for other
determiners, like ‘muito’ and ‘pouco’ - where there is no inflexion retained in the
adverbial cases -, but this choice is more problematic for the inflecting 'todo'. In order to
achieve early (i.e. word class level) disambiguation, which then facilitates syntactic CG
mapping rules, I have opted for a compromise, tagging the singular cases with adverbial
function (7) as " ADV" (marking the morphological word class at least with a
secondary tag, ), and the plural cases with predicative function (8) as "enum>
DET".
Even the predicative cases are functionally quite unique (for a determiner): -
Though also certain other determiners (possessives) can predicate the subject, like
‘minha’ in (7e), they do so as @SC (subject complement), and can not be added as
@PRED (free predicators), especially not in the presence of another @SC (e.g., 8d) or
@PRED (e.g., 8a). The licence to appear as free predicators may still, like the singular
@>A function, reside in the "adverbial potential" of 'todo', but it is another kind of
"adverbiality", - reminiscent of adjectives that in English would be called subject
adjuncts ('he stood tall against the sky'). In adjective-inflecting Portuguese, some
adjectives like 'alto' [high, tall] and 'baixo' [low], can exhibit all degrees of adjectivity
(inflected, (i)) or adverbiality (uninflected, (iii)):
(i) casas altas ('high houses')
(ii) os irmãos crescem altos ('the brothers grow tall')
(iii) os pássaros voam alto ('the birds fly high [in the air]')
173 The Danish translation, ‘helt’, has the same root etymology as in Portuguese, adding the morpheme ‘-t’ for adverb
inflexion.
- 297 -