Eckhard Bick - VISL

4.5.4.5 Adverb disambiguation and operator adverbs
Operator adverbs (ADV )
SET OPERATOR apenas, até, não, nem, senão [kun], sequer, somente, só, sobretudo, também,
tampouco, mais +NUM
mais, menos, demais (um bolo mais)
mais (comeu mais dois bolos)
TIME OPERATOR ainda, de=novo, em=breve, enfim, já, já=não, mais (não mais), mal
META OPERATOR simplesmente, obviamente, sobretudo ... + SET OPERATOR
Not all adverbs can appear in all adverbial slots of the Portuguese sentence, and lexical
knowledge about which adverbs are allowed where, can be of great use to the CG-rules
at the disambiguation level. In fact, when introducing functional subclasses for adverbs,
the primarily intended trade-off for the CG grammar was the disambiguation of other -
non-adverb - categories by providing syntagmatically useful landmarks in the sentence.
However, with a fine-grained subclassification, many adverbs are themselves
ambiguous as a lexeme, and their worth for the CG-disambiguation of non-adverb
categories became interdependent on their own contextual disambiguation, and I have
therefore tried wherever possible to functionally define subclasses that can be
interpreted meaningfully outside the CG rule formalism, too, - not least in a semantic
(or, more restrictedly, MT-oriented) way.
In the preceding chapters, a number of candidate classes for such categorical coextension
of syntactically and semantically defined adverbials has been discussed:
Referentially heavy time-, place- and manner-adverbs or -adverbials (circumstantial
adverbials, cf. also 4.5.4.2) prefer clause-initial or -final positions and trigger
parentheses or commas when they intrude into a valency pattern. Among manneradverbs,
only predicative adverbs are allowed between subject and predicate.
Quantifying adverbs (like mais, menos, muito, imensamente, cf. 4.5.4.3) function as
(usually pre-) modifiers for attributive and adverbial adjects or as adjuncts for the main
verb, and they always appear immediately before or after their head. Relative and
interrogative adverbs (cf. 4.5.4.4) appear in the clause-initial complementiser-position
(of either finite subclauses or averbal subclauses).
This chapter treats a syntactically especially intriguing (closed) class of adverbs
comprised of what I will call operator adverbs. Some, like logical operators, work on
absolute set membership and truth, but many also operate on the relative time or
perspective conditions for such predications. I distinguish three classes:
A) Set operator adverbs (e.g. apenas, não, só, também)
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