Eckhard Bick - VISL

2.2.5.3 Portuguese particles
By ‘particles’ I will here define those “function word subclasses” of ADV, KS, KC,
PRP, SPEC, DET that help glue the sentence together, like relatives, interrogatives,
conjunctions and conjunctional adverbs, quantifiers and operator adverbs. These
adverbs constitute more or less closed lists (with the possible exception of
polylexicals, which are included in the analyser’s lexicon for practical reasons).
The word lists of this chapter have been included mainly in order to illustrate
the kind of lexical information that the parsing modules can draw upon. A more
detailed discussion of the syntactic function of these word classes can be found in
chapter 4.5.4.
Relative adverbs ADV
CONJUNCTIONAL FUNCTION a=proporção=que, ainda=quando, ao=passo=que,
ao=tempo=que, apenas, aquando, assim=como, assim=que, bem=como, cada=vez=que, conforme,
consoante, da=mesma=maneira=que, enquanto, logo=que, na=medida=em=que, onde, qual [Rare],
quando, segundo, sempre=que, senão=quando, tal=como, toda=a=vez=que, todas=as=vezes=que,
tão=como, tão=logo, à=maneira=que, à=medida=que, à=proporção=que
PREPOSITIONAL FUNCTION conforme, consoante, qual, segundo, tão=como
COMPARATIVE FUNCTION como, quanto, que=nem, quão
The word class of relative adverbs is not universally recognised, often one finds most
or all of its members referred to as conjunctions ('venha quando quiser') or
prepositions ('grande como um urso'). However, since a "conjunctional" adverb like
'como' in 'não sei como funciona' is morphologically indistinguishable from the
prepositional 'como' or the "pure" adverbial variant in, for example, an interrogative
sentence like 'como se chama?', I prefer to call them all adverbs and distinguish
between semantico-syntactic sub-classes in order to prepare for syntactic
disambiguation.
A strong argument in favour of the “existence” of relative adverbs in
Portuguese is the use of the future subjunctive tense in "temporally relative" finite
subclauses like 'me avisem quando ele vier!', in much the same way as in
postnominal (attributive) or absolute nominal relative subclauses: 'Seja quem for',
'Podem comprar os livros que acharem interessantes'.
Interrogative adverbs ADV
a=que=propósito, aonde, como, donde, há=quanto=tempo, onde, para=onde, por=que, por=quê,
quando
QUANTIFIERS (INTENSIFIERS) quanto, only as pre-adjects (@>A): quão, que
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
- 89 -