Eckhard Bick - VISL

explanation for this may be that a PATIENT/THEME argument ranks higher on the
obligatority scale than a PLACE or DIRECTION argument in much the same way as the
direct object ranks higher than the object complement in a transobjective construction -
it is, after all, the object that is semantically complemented, not the verb. In fact, both
causatives and ergatives have the argument role of PATIENT, either as external (object)
or as internal (subject) complement.
In Portuguese, locative and directive adverbial complements can be distinguished
lexically through the heading preposition ('em', 'sobre' vs. 'para', 'a') or, to a certain
degree, the head adverb ('aqui' vs. 'fora', which can also be used for a pronominal
substitution test on pp-adverbials). This is why valency marking of adverbial governing
verbs makes sense not only for its own (syntactic) sake, but from a lexical
disambiguational point of view, too. Ir ('to go') and ser ('to be'), for instance, share
many inflexion forms (e.g. all of the perfeito simples, mais-que-perfeito and future
subjunctive tenses), but obligatorily valency-bind different types of complements, -
subject complements in the former, and directive adverbials in the latter case.
Like other non-subject non-pronoun complements, most adverbial objects appear
usually after the main verb (@