Abstract
Prototype effects “permeate the very structure of language itself.” This is correct, but the notion of prototype is too often understood as a vaguely defined continuum, made up of “central” and “marginal” members, without criteria allowing the precise identification of the so-called degrees of prototypicality. Much can be done in order to improve on this situation, and the prototype notion, as far as the description of valency is concerned, can be defined with sufficient precision. They can even be quantified: the transitive construction occurs in the valencies of many verbs, whereas some constructions only occur in the valency of one or a few verbs; and regular verbs (that is to say, morphologically prototypical verbs) are regular just because they are numerous, as against irregular (nonprototypical) ones, which are few or unique. In this chapter the notion of prototype is explored, and shown to apply to several lexicogrammatical phenomena, while admitting of a precise definition. Two important examples are: the prototype rule that stipulates that an Agent is almost always coded as the subject—a rule that has an effectiveness of more than 98% of the cases in Portuguese; and the prototype rules that determine the thematic potential of prepositions.
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Notes
- 1.
This might be more precisely called a valential prototype; here I refer to it simply as a prototype.
- 2.
See an example of nonprototypical de in Sect. 9.4.1 below.
- 3.
Counting only forms current in spoken Brazilian usage.
- 4.
Fazer “make” and trazer “bring” also have this irregularity, but they also have several others.
- 5.
See Perini (2015, p. 273 ff) for a full discussion of this point.
- 6.
Counting by constructions.
- 7.
I owe this objection to Oliver Gobbo.
- 8.
I do not distinguish between simplex and compound prepositions; they behave identically for our purposes. The glosses given, in terms of English prepositions, are only approximate, as there are significant differences between the semantics of individual prepositions in the two languages.
- 9.
I refer to grammatically expressible features of the verb. The whole sentence is also subject to well-formedness filters, which are not linguistic in nature: for instance, a sentence like the Universe began 14 billion years ago does not admit of a Company complement, for nonlinguistic reasons.
- 10.
Also “part of a whole,” as in gosto de carro com ar condicionado “I like cars with air conditioning”: this may be another prototypical role for com. On the other hand, it patterns syntactically like Company/Instrument and has probably done so for a long time: “part of a whole,” “company,” and “instrument” are coded by the same form (morphological case) already in Mycenaean Greek (13th century BC), cf. Magueijo (1980, p. 181 ff).
- 11.
Fui is the past tense of ir.
- 12.
- 13.
I have not seen this device applied to the semantic of prepositions, but the schematic filter idea itself is not new (see following section). In this connection I recall reading Levi’s (1975) dissertation, where she handles the meaning of nonpredicate adjectives in a somewhat similar manner.
- 14.
Or as a result of historical processes which are beyond our capabilities of stating.
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Perini, M.A. (2019). Prototypes and Prototype Rules. In: Thematic Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28538-8_9
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