Eckhard Bick - VISL

Another, rarer, example is the verb saber, which translates ‘knew’ in the PS tense, but
‘got to know’ in the IMPF tense.
• syntactic function discriminators
A number of Portuguese adjectives has two meanings depending on whether they occur
prenominally (@>N) or postnominally (@NN @N<
novo ‘new [another], nouveau’ ‘new [just produced], neuf’
grande ‘big, famous, stor’ ‘big, high, høj’
raro ‘rare, sjælden’ ‘strange, mærkelig’
triste ‘lousy, ussel’ ‘depressed, sørgmodig’
• valency instantiation discriminators
This is an abundant and very useful group of discriminators. Not least, many verbs
allow polysemy discrimination by valency instantiation, as tirar, which is translated
‘pull’ when used monotransitively with a direct object (), but can mean ‘shoot
[at]’ with a prepositional object with ‘em’ (). Another example is viver,
where the Danish translation is ‘leve’ (‘live’) in the case, but ‘opleve’
(‘experience’) with valency.
Note that ordinary word class discrimination (e.g. V vs. ADV for ‘como’) need not be
expressed by means of discriminators, since a difference in word class leads to two
different lexicon entries, i.e. the word form in question is treated as covering two
lexemes (each with its own semantics) – and disambiguated accordingly.
As an example for how different kinds of polysemy discriminators can work
together in one word, let’s look at the verb saber , meaning 'to know' when inflected in
the imperfeito tense, but 'get to know' in the perfeito tense. Here the difference in aspect
is expressed lexically (or, rather, phrasally) in English, but by means of a tense
distinction in Portuguese. Thus, morphological information can be exploited for a
semantic purpose. Word class function could be used, too: if saber appears as an
auxiliary (@AUX), it means 'to be able to'. Finally, syntactic information from other
constituents of the clause can be used in order to instantiate one of several lexically
possible valency patterns of the verb saber: While both 'to know' and 'get to know' ask
for direct objects, the translation alternative 'to taste' is to be chosen for adverbial
complements (bem/mal - 'good'/'bad'), and 'to taste of' before a prepositional object
introduced by the preposition 'a'.
(11) saber V
@MV, IMPF, 'know'
@MV, PERF, 'get to know'
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