Eckhard Bick


PORTUGUESE SYNTAX


Teaching manual

Last updated: March 2001


1. Introduction: Grammatical conventions *

1.1. The flat classical model: word function, no form *
1.2. Pure Dependency Grammar: word chains (syntactic form), no function *
1.3. Pure Constituent Grammar: hierarchical word grouping (syntactic form), no function *
1.4. Adding function *
1.4.1. Dependency Grammar with function labels *
1.4.2. Constraint Grammar *
1.4.3. Enriched Constituent Grammar *

2. Building trees: The notion of constituent *

3. Clause level functions *

3.1. Clause level arguments (valency governed) *
3.2. Clause level adjuncts (not valency governed) *
3.3. Syntactic function vs. semantic function *

4. Subordination *

5. The function of verbal constituents *

6. Group forms and group level constituent function *

6.1. Noun phrases (np) *
6.2. Ad-word phrases (ap) *
6.3. Prepositional phrases (pp) *
6.4. Pronoun phrases *
7. Clause types *

7.1. Finite subclauses * 7.1.1. Nominal finite subclauses *
7.1.2. Attributive finite subclauses *
7.1.3. Adverbial finite subclauses *
7.2. Non-finite subclauses * 7.2.1. Infinitive subclauses *
7.2.2. Gerund subclauses *
7.2.3. Participle subclauses *
7.2.3.1. Attributive participles *
7.2.3.2. Participles in verb chains *
7.2.3.3. Ablativus absolutus *
7.3. Averbal subclauses *
7.4. ACI and causatives *

8. Co-ordination *

9. Comparatives *

10. Utterance function *

11. Topic and focus constructions *

Appendiks 1: Word classes (morphological form) *


This text is meant to fulfill a double function: First of all, it has been written as an introductory course in Portuguese Syntax for university students, but it can also be seen as a kind of manual for the Portuguese section of the interactive grammar teaching tools provided by the VISL project at Odense University (https://edu.visl.dk). Most sentences and analyses discussed in this text have thus been made available as interactive syntactic trees on the internet. Moreover, the parsing tools at the VISL site allow the user to work with changed sentences, as well as enter completely new sentences for automatic analysis, or even running text copied from on-line newspapers. Analyses can be performed at different levels (morphology, syntax, semantics), and within different grammatical frameworks (Constraint Grammar, Constituent Tree Grammar). Also, at the VISL site, users have access to a Portuguese-Danish and Danish-Portuguese electronic lexicon, word-for-word automatic translation and running text translation.