Abstract
Determining the head of complex noun phrases is in general not an easy task in Portuguese. In the case of uma garrafa de vinho ‘a bottle of wine’, in combination with quebrou-se ‘broke’ or derramou ‘spilled’, it is the selection restrictions of the verb that determine which noun functions as head. This paper deals with a specific type of Brazilian Portuguese NP, aquele idiota do médico ‘that idiot of a doctor’, called “binominal” by Aarts (1998). The two types of nominal elements, linked by the preposition de, are the first constituent, idiota ‘idiot’, which has an evaluative status, and the second constituent, médico ‘doctor’, which has a referential status. The hypothesis defended here is that the evaluative nature of the first constituent and the referential nature of the second consist in a conclusive criterion for the determination of headedness.
Highlights
In the grammatical tradition, the use of the term “head” to capture the linguist's intuitions about what constitutes the most important part of the noun phrase ( NP) implies, in general, a semantic description (Jespersen 1924: 96)
The only majoritarian election in the dictatorship was for the Senate
It is not a trivial task to point out the head of constructions with two nominal elements linked by the preposition de ‘of’ in Portuguese
Summary
The use of the term “head” to capture the linguist's intuitions about what constitutes the most important part of the noun phrase ( NP) implies, in general, a semantic description (Jespersen 1924: 96) This notion of head as the most important idea or primary element is still present in many characterizations of the term (Dik 1997a: 134; Quirk et al 1985: 60). The operational tests defined to prove the reliability of this semantic notion of head require, on the one hand, that the head be distributionally equivalent to the whole construction and, on the other hand, that it be the obligatory constituent of the NP (Quirk et al 1985: 60f.; Zwicky 1985: 11; Huddleston/Pullum 2002: 24) This position allows us to identify, for instance, car as the head of an NP like the blue car, since it is enabled to replace the NP as a whole, especially in anaphoric reference. This paper is organized as follows: section 2 deals with the concept of NP from the Functional Discourse Grammar viewpoint; section 3 gives a pragmatically-based description of binominal NPs in Portuguese; section 4 shows other complementary criteria for the headedness of binominals; Section 5 takes up the main findings of the analysis and presents some generalizations and theoretical implications
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