Eckhard Bick - VISL

accent, and the pronoun ‘o’ changing into 'lo' or 'no' depending on the preceding
sound. While this is more difficult than the recognition of simple strings of adjacent
words as polylexicals, it can become even more computing intensive to figure out
whether the form 'xxxá-lo' has to be canonised into 'xxxar- o' (infinitive) or 'xxxaz- o'
(irregular present tense 3rd person singular). The latter case is a morphological
ambiguity, which can only be resolved by consulting the core lexicon - something a
preprocessor isn't normally supposed to do. 18
Another, more syntactic, puzzle in the cited examples - at least from an English point
of view - is the missing subject. A strict generative rule for sentence analysis, like 'S
-> NP VP', wouldn't work here. The subject is, in fact, represented by a bound
morpheme: -'ei' (I), '-am' (they) or '-e' (he, it) 19 . This is one of the reasons why I
prefer to analyse a Portuguese sentence not as a binary entity consisting of subject
and predicate, or NP and VP, but as one big set of dependencies around a verbal
nucleus, with the subject being read as a facultative (valency bound) argument of the
verbal constituant. In (4) the subject argument, not being part of the verb's valency
pattern, is altogether missing, - it can not be expressed as an independent word. 20
2.2.4.3 The petebista-problem: productive abbreviations
Abbreviations have never been easy to recognize, neither for foreigners nor for
parsers: there are new abbreviations all the time, names of organisations, products,
new diseases, pharmaceuticals and others. Their morphology incorporates signs like
'.', '-' and '/', making it difficult to decide what is a sentence delimiter and what is part
of an abbreviation. Also, abbreviations can mimic other word classes, especially
nouns, with gender category or even number inflexion.
But in (Brazilian) Portuguese newspaper and social science texts, they really
come alive! For example, the names of political parties or interest groups, of which
there are quite a few in Brazil, may have their abbreviations phoneticised letter by
letter. Thus 'PTB' (a Brazilian Workers’ Party) reads 'pe-te-be', which becomes a new
word root in its own right. Like many nouns and names, it may be suffixed with 'ista',
'-ismo' and others. To make things even more complicated, letter names may
18 In the PALAVRAS system, the preprocessor can access the main lexicon, both for this particular task and for others, -
like polylexical identification, or for checking verbal incorporation patterns.
19 This "subject pronoun inflexion morpheme" appears at the head verb of the sentence' verb chain, i.e. on the first
auxiliary, if there is one, or else on the main verb. In Portuguese this holds even if this verb is not a finite form, but an
infinitive. If the subject is (also) expressed as an independent word or group, there has to be agreement between the
overt subject and the "enclitic inflexion ending subject".
20 The above also precludes a view defining clauses as structures containing more than one word. Portuguese utterances
like (4) are clearly sentences, and imperatives are an example that works for both Portuguese and English. Here, one
must either accept one-word sentences or redefine the notion of 'word'. Is a word to be a blank space surrounded string,
a hyphen/blank space surrounded string, or can it include even fused enclitics that are morphologically indistinguishable
from inflexion endings (cp. chapter 2.2.2.2 and 2.2.4.2) ? Alternatively, one could emphasize the special (syntactic)
status of a one-word “syntax-less” utterance like imperatives by calling it a sentence that is not a clause (unlike ordinary
clauses that feature some kind of clausal nexus). For a more detailed discussion of word- and clause-hood, see also the
VISL manual “Portuguese Syntax” (Bick, 1999).
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