Eckhard Bick - VISL

where brackets mean optional constituents, and the '+' means one or more
constituents of the same type. In the PROP+ chains I have chosen a "left leaning"
dependency analysis treating the first proper noun as the head and all others as
postnominals: @NP-HEAD @N< @N< ... A strong argument for this choice is the
fact that it is the first proper noun (usually a person's Christian name) that determines
the gender of the whole PROP chain. The same argument may be used in deciding on
a head for the name chain as a whole. Here, the leftward orientation continues, since
- if there is one -, the leading pre-name noun (a title, for instance) will pass its gender
and number features on to the name chain as a whole. Consider the agreement
evidence in: os senhores Smith são ricos (plural), a rainha Smith é rica (Queen
Smith, feminine), or even (in a kindergarten role play) *a rainha George é bela
(feminine?). Of course, in many cases title and name have the same gender and
number anyway, or a gender ambiguous title like presidente may even draw its
gender feature from the following name. In a constructed, conflicting case, however,
the title "wins" the semantic struggle where surface marking is forced, like in the
example of subject complement agreement (rainha George é bela) - though I must
admit that I have yet to find a "real" corpus example.
Stress patterns in spoken Portuguese, English and Danish also support a "left
leaning" analysis: One would expect the modifying ('special') piece of information to
be stress-focused, as is indeed the case in "The White House", "Kennedy jr.", "King
George", which implicitly answer the question "which house?", "which Kennedy?",
"which king?". Finally, the modifier character of surnames is strengthened by the
fact that surnames are often derived from patronyms, toponyms or profession terms,
likewise specifying which of a number of bearers of the same Christian name is
targeted: "Peter Johnson/Sørensen", "Peter Bloomfield/Sprogø", "Peter
Miller/Møller".
In some languages, Portuguese included, PPs are used to form surnames (cp.
'de', 'of', 'von', 'zu', 'van' etc. in the European melting pot), clearly suggesting
modifier etymology, and I will therefore treat recognisable prepositional groups in
name chains accordingly - i.e. as postnominal modifiers (cp. 4') - adding more meat
to the left leaning structural analysis. At the same time, the internal structure of the
PP is retained, i.e. the (first) name inside the PP is tagged as argument of preposition
(@P