Eckhard Bick - VISL

de 77 % 23 % -
em 33 % 12 % 55 %
para 8 % 23 % 69 %
por 38 % 15 % 46 %
Provided full nominal valency is implemented in the lexicon, two of the cases can be
resolved 100%: a always prefers the adverbial over the postnominal modifier reading,
and de is, when in doubt, a postnominal modifier. Though de does enter in adverbial
pairs with a (from - to/till), this was rare in the above statistics 184 , and it also is more
significant for a than for de, since de is 10 times as frequent in postnominal position.
Also, in the de...a pair, it is usually a that gets a left-hand noun context, while de
follows the verb: todos adoram V, do primogênito N ao caçula.. The preference of a for
an adverbial reading is further upheld by a kind of retrograde valency, where the noun
in adverbial expressions like à distância, a disposição, à moda is marked by a tag
which helps disambiguate the preceding preposition.
For por, virtually all the modifier @N< instances are "frequency terms" like
horas por dia, dólares por dia, vezes por semana, which can be identified by right hand
context, too, by looking for TIME-nouns of the (duration) subclass.
Para is much more likely to be used adverbially, and - like for a - a common right
hand context suggesting such an @ADVL reading is a verb in the infinitive, making the
PP a kind of purposive "subclause"
The hard cases left, then, are com and em, which in postnominal position can be
used to express a feature or the location of an object, respectively. Sadly, neither feature
modifiers nor location modifiers need to be valency bound. Crude semantic rules can be
fashioned to supplement the purely statistical rule of preferring the adverbial reading,
after all valency information has been used. Thus, since com + feature is semantically
unlikely to function as adverbial, semantic tags denoting features (like , )
can be used to decide on postnominality for com-PPs. Likewise, em-PPs could be
tagged for @ADVL if they do not denote place, but time, since only a restricted set of
deverbal nouns or 'happenings' allows temporal modifiers.
184 Rather, most cases would be treated as valency bound adverbial objects (@ADV) in conjunctions with MOVE-verbs.
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