Eckhard Bick - VISL

O Itamarati
+HUM @SUBJ
The Itamarati [palace of government] announced new taxes
Here, the verb anunciar (‘proclaim’) creates a “subject space” that is destined as
+HUM. Provided that the syntactic CG module establishes a correct subject-predicator
link, this semantic projection can have two effects:
(a) With a polysemous filler, it may help resolve the polysemy. In O leão
penalizou a especulação (‘The tax-lion punished speculation’), leão is a Brazilian
symbol for the finance department, and as such does not belong to the semantic
prototype (animal), but to (human institution), which is the reading selected
by the +HUM subject projection of penalizar.
(b) With a semantically unambiguous filler, that is -HUM, the semantic projection
of anunciar (or penalizar) creates +HUM as a metaphoric reading. Here, a place name
is metaphorically turned into an institution (metonymical transfer).
Incidentally, some metaphors would be treated in this way in spite of having
become “dictionary-worthy” due to their frequency, simply because a metaphor may be
so universal that it will not materialise in a lexicon that defines polysemy in terms of
bilingual discrepancy. In A estrela hesitou, for instance, estrela (‘star’) would be read as
+HUM rather than , but still be translated in the same way.
In the examples, semantic projection is interpreted as metaphoric transfer in the
direction of valency, from head to dependent. This is quite common also in the case of
non-valency projections: In um dia triste (‘a sad day’), it is the -HUM head dia that
projects a semantic change in the modifier triste. A day is not sad the same way a
human being is, but the projection is still far more acceptable than imagining a “humansentient”
kind of “day” 230 .
Still, the conclusion that metaphoric transfer is preferably induced by head-todependent
projection, is questionable: Dependent-to-head projection is not rare at all, as
in o coronel explodiu (‘the colonel exploded’), where explodir prototypically is
(i.e. does not take human subjects), but is interpreted as in a humanoid manner when the
feature is forced upon it by a semantically unambiguous +HUM subject, with the
resulting concept being one of “explosive behaviour” rather than a soldier being torn to
pieces like a bomb. Rather than dependency-direction, it seems to be semantic criteria
230 As a matter of fact, my tag set provides for this case with a feature stating the “normality” of “human” modifiers
with nouns of a certain class. would not be used with ‘dia’, though, but with certain more typical prototype classes,
such as and .
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anunciou
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