Abstract
Thematically transparent phrases and prepositions: units that have a semantic role independently from the verb they occur with.
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Notes
- 1.
For our purposes no distinction need be made between simple and complex prepositions.
- 2.
The dichotomy adjunct/complement, though, leaves a lot to be said, and is not systematically used here (see discussion in Sect. 1.7).
- 3.
We will see below how to include in the notation this interplay of prototypical roles and verb-specific roles.
- 4.
For some speakers, also with its synonym terminar; but concluir, completar, findar, also near-synonyms of acabar, take no complement with com. Com+NP is a Patient also with sumir and consumir ‘lose, make disappear’: ela sumiu com o meu caderno ‘she lost my notebook’, and correr ‘chase, run out’: eu corri com o cachorro da sala ‘I chased the dog out of the living room’.
- 5.
All I give here are some possibilities; this is still a point to be researched.
- 6.
Perhaps in an Arctic context, referring to the dog pulling Joaquim’s sledge?
- 7.
Other transparent prepositions are apesar de ‘in spite of’, contra ‘against’, conforme ‘according to’.
- 8.
There is some work done on this topic, for instance Oliveira (2009) for em.
- 9.
Not everything is clear here: da gripe (with the article a, here agglutinated with de) can be a Source of sorts, if the verb is adequate: meu pai saiu da gripe muito fraco ‘my father came out of the flu very weak’. I have no explanation for this fact.
- 10.
I keep referring to prototypes as defined for the purposes of analyzing valency.
- 11.
And part of the schema it evokes.
- 12.
Referentiality is the main function of NPs, semantically, and this is probably why they can be Agent and Patient. The fundamentally referential role of NPs was studied by Liberato (1997).
- 13.
For instance in a polícia acabou com a festa ‘the police ended the party’, or in composto por Wolfgang ‘composed by Wolfgang’.
- 14.
The notion of “semantic pairing” and its grammatical significance is examined in Chap. 10.
References
Liberato, Yara G. 1997. A estrutura do SN em português: uma abordagem cognitiva [The structure of the NP in Portuguese: a cognitive approach]. Belo Horizonte: Doctoral thesis, UFMG.
Naess, Åshild. 2007. Prototypical Transitivity. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
Oliveira, Aparecida A. de. 2009. Relações semântico-cognitivas no uso da preposição ‘em’ no português do Brasil [Semantic-cognitive relations in the use of the preposition em in Brazilian Portuguese]. Belo Horizonte: Doctoral thesis, UFMG.
Rothstein, S. 1983. The Syntactic Forms of Predication. Cambridge, MA: Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
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Perini, M.A. (2015). Prepositions, Transparency, and Prototypes. In: Describing Verb Valency. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20985-2_7
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