Subclasses of Temporal and Spatial Phrases in Portuguese – Location vs. Mere Reference

This paper deals with the diversity of temporal and spatial phrases – mainly those headed by prepositions or preposition-like connectives – that convey locating information or involve mere temporal/spatial reference. It shows that the different subclasses are quite heterogeneous in Portuguese, and exhibit interesting, syntactically complex, patterns. A certain degree of instability in their use, likely indicative of linguistic change (mainly in Standard European Portuguese), is illustrated through the use of corpora examples. English data is often used for comparison. The formal framework underlying the linguistic analyses is Discourse Representation Theory (cf. Kamp & Reyle 1993).


Categorial diversity of temporal/spatial phrases, expressing location and mere reference
Previous work on Portuguese temporal phrases (e.g. Móia 2000Móia , 2001 has emphasized the issue of categorial diversity within this class, claiming that -when temporal location and temporal reference are consideredtwo major distinct, though interrelated, subclasses need be distinguished: (i) temporal locating adjuncts, which are used to associate eventualities with time intervals, asserting when things happened; (ii) timedenoting expressions, which are used simply to identify, or denote, time intervals. The former class is prototypically exemplified by prepositional phrases headed by em ('in'), as in (1); the second, by nominal phrases as o século XX ('the 20th century'), as in (2): (1) O Paulo casou em 1990.
the century XX was stage of great events 'The 20 th century was a stage for great events.' A parallel distinction is relevant in the spatial domain, as underlined by Móia (2001: 47). Thus, spatial locating phrases -as em Londres ('in London'), in o Paulo casou em Londres ('Paulo got married in London')differ from space-denoting expressions -as a Inglaterra ('England'), in a Inglaterra foi palco de grandes acontecimentos ('England was a stage for great events'). From a semantic point of view, temporal/spatial locating adjuncts are used to locate eventualities (ev) in time intervals (t) or spaces/areas (a), that is, in a formal framework like Discourse Representation Theory (cf. Kamp & Reyle 1993) -and using the conventional notation in brackets above -, they are assumed to contribute relational DRS-conditions, such as [ev ⊆ t/a], [t/a ⊆ ev], [ev O t/a] to the interpretation of the spaces/areas. As such, they have a referential function comparable to that of NPs like esta cadeira ('this chair'), or esse terramoto ('that earthquake'), for common objects and eventualities, respectively. In the same framework, these expressions can be regarded as contributing relatively simpler DRS-conditions, of the form [denoting expression (t/a)] (often, a reducible condition -cf. Móia 2000: 206-218), to the interpretation of the sentences in which they occur.
From a distributional point of view, the two subclasses at stake are also very different, an aspect which is crucial for the purposes of the present paper. More precisely, locating phrases occur in adjunct positions, both strictly adverbial and adnominal, as in (3) and (4) (ii) complement of an argumental preposition, as de or para -cf. (6); (iii) complement of a non-argumental temporal preposition, within an adjunct, as até a or desde -cf. (7); (iv) complement of a non-argumental preposition (de), within a nominal modifier or appositive -cf. (8).
(5) {O século XX / A Inglaterra} foi palco de grandes acontecimentos. the century XX / the England was stage of great events '{The 20 th century / England} was a stage for great events.' (6) a. O problema data do século XIX.
the problem dates of-the century XIX 'The problem dates back to the 19 th century.' b. Os quadros foram levados para a Inglaterra.
the paintings were taken to the England 'The paintings were taken to England.' (7) a. A espécie sobreviveu até ao século XX.
the species survived until to-the century XX 'The species survived until the 20 th century.' b. Os contentores foram trazidos por mar desde a Inglaterra. the containers were brought by sea since the England 'The containers were brought by sea from England.' (8) os problemas de {o século XX / a Inglaterra} the problems of the century XX / the England 'the problems of {the 20 th century / England} Furthermore, denoting expressions are normally ungrammatical in adjunct positions -cf. (9) -, and, conversely, locating adjuncts are normally ungrammatical in nominal positions -cf. (10).
the problem dates of in 1990 '*The problem dates back to in 1990.' b. *Os quadros foram levados para em Londres.
the paintings were taken to in London '*The paintings were taken to in London.' Móia (2000) also underlines that some Portuguese phrases can occur with the same surface form in both adjunct and nominal contexts. These (apparently) ambivalent expressions therefore act both as locating adjuncts and as denoting expressions, depending on the context. Relatively simple examples are hoje ('today'), esta semana ('this week') or aqui ('here'), whose occurrence in adjunct and nominal positions is exemplified in (11) and (12) the paintings were brought to here 'The paintings were brought here.' The ambivalence of comparable English or French phrases has, of course, been noted before in the literature (cf. e.g. the observations in Asher et al. 1995: 109 about the behaviour of French hier, or those in Kamp & Reyle 1993: 623 about English last N-phrases).
The hypothesis Móia (2000) advocates, in order to account for the double behaviour of these expressions without resorting to double categorisation, is to postulate a null locating preposition (with the semantic value of em) in adjunct position, as portrayed in (13) As for prepositional phrases, the same author notes that some of them -like those headed by temporal antes ('before'), or, I add here, spatial dentro ('inside') -exhibit the same ambivalent behaviour of hoje ('today') or aqui ('here'). These phrases can, in fact, occur both in adjunct -cf. (15) -and in (most) nominal contexts -cf.
(16) -, and therefore, in adjunct position, a null locating preposition is also postulated.
(15) A estátua foi restaurada Ø em {antes da guerra / dentro da igreja}. the statue was restored Ø in before of-the war / inside of-the church 'The statue was restored Ø in {before the war / inside the church}.' (16) a. O problema data de antes da guerra.
the problem dates of before of-the war 'The problem dates from before the war.' b. A estátua foi trazida para dentro da igreja.
the statue was brought to inside of-the church 'The statue was brought into the church.' c. os problemas de antes da guerra the problems of before of-the war 'the problems from before the war' d. os azulejos de dentro da igreja the tiles of inside of-the church 'the tiles inside the church' The possibility of combining temporal prepositions in this type of sequences has been mentioned for English as well -cf. e.g. references to since before or until after, in D.C. Bennett (1970: 280-281) and Declerck (1991: 288), or since. . . ago, in Móia (2003. Declerck (1991), in particular, contemplates a similar type of null preposition-analysis for adverbial before and after (though he does not elaborate on it): "perhaps we can even consider before/after the war as a reduction from something like at (a time) before/after the war" (op. cit., apud Móia 1998: 3-4, fn. 6). A corollary of the facts described so far is that temporal/spatial prepositions (and, for that matter, comparable connectives, like complex prepositions, conjunctions, or grammaticalized verb forms like há -cf. Móia 2011a) fall into two main syntactic-semantic categories, as given in Table 1 below: on the one hand, heads of temporal/spatial locating adjuncts, like em; on the other hand, heads of time/space-denoting expressions, like antes or dentro. They are distinguished -as already said -both by their syntactic distribution and their semantic interpretation.
This table expands Móia's (2000) work by integrating two new features: (i) inclusion of spatial (besides temporal) connectives -and (ii) further subdivision of the heads of denoting expressions, setting apart the distributionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent cases, a topic that will be explored in section 2. Furthermore, in section 3, a reassessment of the class of true locating connectives (as portrayed in the table below) will be made, which shows that it intriguingly possesses a great deal of inner diversity, not yet explored in the literature, to my knowledge.
Before moving on, I will add a new syntactic context that is also worthy of consideration for the aims of this paper: the combination with time/space hypernyms, like período/área, in examples like (17) and (18), where the temporal span or spatial area identified by the whole NP is co-extensive with the one identified by the sequence following the hypernym.   (18) a área {de / *em / dentro de} a casa the area of / in / inside of the house 'the house area / *the area in the house / the area inside the house' Though (arguably) not exactly nominal, this context has comparable properties, in that it does not allow the prototypical locating connective em (cf., however, footnote 4), while it allows for heads of time/space-denoting expressions like antes or dentro (besides the typical preposition for noun modifiers, de).

Subdiving complex time/space-denoting expressions
In this section, I will analyse the class of complex time/space-denoting expressions, headed by prepositional (or similar) connectives, and show that they come in two different groups, this further subdivision being more relevant for spatial expressions than for temporal ones, as will be shown.

Ambivalent complex time/space-denoting expressions
Let us start with the subset of (apparently) ambivalent complex phrases, that is, those that occur with the same surface form both in nominal and (in combination with a null locating preposition) in adjunct positions. As for temporal phrases, these correspond to a relatively large set (cf. Móia 2000). It includes sequences headed by connectives antes de ('before'), depois de (' after'), após (' after'), entre ('between'), quando ('when'), and -in combination with predicates of amounts of time (X-TIME) -há/havia [X-TIME] ('[X-TIME] ago', '[X-TIME] before'), dentro de [X-TIME] ('[X-TIME] from now'), de Y a [X-TIME] ('[X-TIME] from Y'), [X-TIME] antes de ('[X-TIME] before'), [X-TIME] depois de ('[X-TIME] after'), [X-TIME] após ('[X-TIME] after'), and the like. As said, they are all ambivalent and readily appear in adjunct position, with a null locating preposition. Furthermore, they often occur in nominal contexts, as witnessed by the following excerpts from the corpus (of Portuguese newspaper texts) CETEMPúblico. Glosses (in these corpora examples, as in any others henceforth) are provided just for the relevant (highlighted) part of the excerpt.

elections of there-is four years
Though English is not my object language, a similar behaviour of comparable English connectives is easily documented, as in the following examples, taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English: «Lawyer John Henry Browne said Robert Bales remembers some details from before and after the killings (. . .).» (Associated Press, 2012); «What she found were over 26,000 artifacts dating to between 1840 and 1876.» (Archaeology, 2011); «That reinforced earlier bad feelings from when he dropped the proposed "public option" for a government plan to compete with private insurance as part of the health care overhaul.» (Associated Press, 2011); «Until moments ago people were still being rescued from atop the twin towers.» (ABC_2020, 1993). As for spatial phrases, these correspond to a smaller, though still considerably large set, headed by connectives like dentro de ('inside'), fora de (' ouside'), perto de ('near', ' close to'), junto de ('beside', 'next to'), and the like. Again, they readily occur in adjunct position, as locating phrases (with a null locating preposition), and in nominal position, as mere space-denoting expressions. See the following examples from CETEMPúblico: -as locating adjuncts (23) , 2009). Now, this group of (apparently) ambivalent spatial phrases includes a few remarkable and rather unique elements in Portuguese (that seem to have no comparable temporal examples). I will mention three especially common ones, though possibly others exist. These are particularly complex sequences -headed by por cima de, para trás de and detrás de -that, despite integrating an initial preposition (por, para, de), followed by another complex preposition (cima de or trás de), work as a (lexicalized) grammatical unit. In particular, the initial preposition is an element no longer amenable to compositional analysis. The following CETEMPúblico excerpts illustrate the use of these three phrases as locating sequences, in adjunct position (where they combine with yet another, null locating, preposition), and as space-denoting expressions, in nominal position.

Non-ambivalent complex time/space-denoting expressions
The most common time-denoting expressions headed by prepositional (or similar) connectives -listed in the preceding section -are all ambivalent (occurring with the same surface form in adjunct and in nominal positions). No indisputably prepositional temporal connectives seem to behave non-ambivalently, requiring an explicit locating connective (e.g. em) in adjunct contexts. There are, however, a few examples, of temporal phrases headed by complex nominal-based expressions -e.g. meados de ('middle of') and finais de (' end of') 3 -that behave in this way: What is interesting to note is that the parallel group of (non-ambivalent complex) spatial phrases has a much wider range, and includes extremely common elements, which are -furthermore -indisputably prepositional, as acknowledged even in traditional Portuguese grammars. This fact constitutes a noteworthy asymmetry between temporal and spatial expressions.
In fact, complex spatial phrases that have a different form when used as locating expressions (in adjunct contexts) -with an explicit locating preposition, em or a -and as denoting expressions (in nominal contexts), includes elements as common as (a)trás de ('behind'), (a) a frente de ('in front of'), (em) cima de (' above'), (em) baixo de ('below'), (a)o lado de ('beside'), and the like. Note that the parenthesised preposition (em, a) appears to be, still today, an autonomous grammatical element (though it is, in some cases, prone to grammaticalization -cf. Many of these spatial connectives have distributional idiosyncrasies that might be taken as signs of grammaticalization into complex prepositions. I will mention two, that, moreover, distinguish them from their temporal counterparts in the ambivalent group (e.g. antes de): (i) they do not occur in direct combination with space hypernyms (in the type of construction described before), but rather require a locating preposition in that context -(44a) (vs. (44b) and (43) behind of-the church is the area that needs of an intervention more urgent Additionally, the assignment of complex spatial expressions to the ambivalent or non-ambivalent classes reveals some amount of variation, evincive of linguistic change. For instance, European and Brazilian Portuguese seem to differ in what concerns the use (and therefore the categorisation) of atrás de-phrases. Whereas in Standard European Portuguese, they are systematically associated with adjunct positions only, in Brazilian Portuguese, they also appear in nominal contexts -cf. (48). This is, of course, an indication that the element a (in atrás) has been grammaticalized in these Brazilian Portuguese sequences, where it is no longer interpreted as a locating (autonomously computed) preposition.

Heterogeneity within the class of (temporal) locating connectives
Let us now move to the class of truly temporal locating connectives, which include, according to Móia (2000), the following members (cf. . What I will try to show in this section is that this is, after all, a somewhat heterogeneous class, whose exact boundaries are possibly in need of some revision. In fact, research in corpora (discussed below) reveals a relatively complex picture, with these connectives displaying a rather intricate syntactic pattern: though the phrases they head behave primarily as adjuncts, they exhibit (more or less) vestigial traits of time-denoting expressions, which are possible signs of linguistic change. Symptomatically, some of these traits -namely those with the connective durante ('during'), which will be explored in section 3.2 -are associated with marginal or anomalous corpora cases (with varying degrees of anomaly, from slight to severe anomaly). In other words, the use of locating connectives appears to be a "critical area" -in the sense of Peres & Móia (1995) -in contemporary Standard European Portuguese.
Let us consider each connective separately, since their properties vary a great deal.

Em
As said before, preposition em ('in', ' on', ' at') can be regarded as the prototypical temporal locating connective. In fact, it has all the properties of locating connectives and only these, namely it never occurs in nominal (or nominal-like) contexts 4 -cf. (49). The less frequent, and semantically more specific, temporal connectives a ('in', ' on', ' at') -in e.g. o Paulo nasceu a 10 de Dezembro de 1985 ('Paulo was born on December 10, 1985.') -and ao longo de ('throughout' 5 ) seem to behave similarly. All other connectives classified by Móia (2000) as temporal locating occur in a very limited number of nominal contexts (see Table 2, in section 3.9).

Durante
The preposition durante (' during') is semantically similar to em, but it readily takes situational complements (e. However, corpora show that the use of durante is somewhat unstable, and different from em to a certain extent. Namely, it occurs -though in non-standard constructions -in two unexpected situations: (i) in nominal contexts, as head of time-denoting expressions; (ii) explicitly, rather than implicitly, in adjunct position before ambivalent prepositional phrases. Let us start with the use of durante-phrases in nominal contexts, as denoting expressions. I found 11 examples in the corpus CETEMPúblico 6 (besides 2 possible typos 7 ): 4 after argumental preposition para, 2 (very marginal) with strictly temporal complements -cf. (51) 1970 and 1972; during between 1936 and 1945; during  Note that the number of non-standard constructions found in the corpus CETEMPúblico (16) is extremely low, taking into account that durante is one of the most common words in Portuguese (it ranks 318th in the list provided by Nascimento et al. 1987: 689-718), occurring 135821 times in CETEMPúblico (approximately 70 % of which are of the relevant type 10 ).

Enquanto
Phrases with enquanto ('while') take sentences that represent non-punctual eventualities as complements All other three nominal contexts mentioned before seem incompatible with enquanto-phrases (cf., however, section 3.8 below): (61) ??as leis de enquanto os socialistas estiveram no governo the laws of while the socialists were in-the government (62) *O problema data de enquanto os socialistas estiveram no governo.
the problem dates of while the socialists were in-the government 9 Search "Durante|durante" "antes|depois|após|entre|quando|há|havia|dentro|daqui|daí|dali|de|desde". Interestingly, the same searches in the Brazilian corpora NILC-São Carlos and Corpus Brasileiro v 2.3 only produced, besides many possible typos (?), 2 examples comparable to the European Portuguese ones, all with durante entre (ficou fora de operação ontem durante entre 0h10 e 10h07; a crítica literária surgida durante entre os séculos XVII e XIX). 10 Portuguese preposition durante has two homonyms (cf. e.g. Móia 2000: (i) a locating connective (the type under consideration in this paper), typically corresponding to English during, which has time-denoting/situational expressions as complements; (ii) a duration connective, typically corresponding to English for, which has predicates of amounts of time as complements. I analysed the first 200 (of the 135821) uses of durante in the CETEMPúblico corpus, and the distribution is as follows: locating connective -139 uses (69,5%); duration connective -61 uses (30,5%).
(63) *A lei esteve em vigor desde enquanto os socialistas estiveram no governo até ao ano passado. the law was in force since while the socialists were in-the government until to-the last year

Desde
Phrases with desde ('since') define location intervals by fixing their lower bound via (nominal or sentential) complements. In most cases, the upper bound of the location interval coincides with the temporal perspective point of the sentence, that is, desde-phrases normally act as deictic/anaphoric expressions. They occur grammatically in combination with time hypernyms, as witnessed by the following CETEMPúblico examples: All other four nominal contexts mentioned before seem incompatible with desde-phrases (cf., however, section 3.8 below): (65) *Desde a entrada em vigor da lei tem sido um período muito calmo. since the entrance in force of-the law has been a period very calm (66) *As leis de desde 1955 têm sido muito pouco eficazes.
the laws of since 1955 have been very little effective (67) *Os problemas datam de desde a entrada em vigor da lei.
the problems date of since the entrance in force of-the law (68) *Os problemas têm persistido até desde os últimos meses. [até ≡ 'until'] the problems have persisted until since the last months

A partir de
Phrases with the complex preposition a partir de ('from [. . . onwards]', literally 'to start/leave from') are semantically similar to desde, inasmuch as both define location intervals by fixing their lower bound via their complements. They differ syntactically in that a partir de only takes nominal complements, and semantically in that a partir de does not normally impose any restriction on the upper bound of the location interval (which is often left undefined). Both phrases with desde and a partir de occur grammatically in combination with time hypernyms -cf. (64) above and (69) below; the latter, contrary to the former, though, may also be used after argumental prepositions (namely para) -cf. (70).
the laws of to start of 1955 have been very little effective (73) *A lei esteve em vigor desde a partir de 1955 (até dez anos depois).
the law was in force since to start of 1955 (until ten years after)

Até (a)
Phrases with até (a) ('until', 'by')  Of course, the fact that até-phrases can grammatically occur in the nominal contexts just mentioned raises the issue of whether this preposition should rather be classified as a regular head of time-denoting expressions (and not as a genuine locating connective). I will leave this issue open, but note, however, that unlike e.g. antes-phrases, which may be used after desde, até-phrases never occur as complements of any other temporal preposition. In fact, none of the connectives considered as genuinely "locating" in Móia (2000) do -cf.  de 1970 a 1982.» (ext61052-clt-94b-2) music of 1970 to 1982 When the relevant preposition is de (as in (80a) and (81)), the elimination always occurs for obvious identity reasons (i.e. haplology of the sequence de de); when it is a different preposition, as para, elimination often occurs anyway -cf. (80b); however, a few -perhaps slightly marginal -cases with explicit de after the argumental preposition para can be found in These constructions raise some formal (compositional) issues. In fact, the phrases with durative connectives seem to be ambivalent between mere time-denoting expressions, when used as arguments of durative verbs -as in (86)-(88) -, and locating expressions (also contributing the relational locating information), when used adverbially, as in: 11 Searches with [lema = "prever|marcar|agendar"] yielded 5 results with preposition elimination -type (80b) -and the same number with the sequence ="para" "de" -type (82). By far, the most common way to express the relevant type of information, with lowerand upper-bounded intervals, is by resorting to time hypernyms (cf. (17) and (79) above) -or to comparable temporal nouns -in NPs which immediately follow the preposition para -(para) o período de X a Y (literally '(for) the period from X to Y', (para) os dias/ anos X a Y (literally '(for) the days/years X to Y'), (para) a semana de X a Y (literally '(for) the week of X to Y'). More than 60 results of these latter constructions were found in the CETEMPúblico corpus. Now, several technical hypotheses can be considered, in order to translate the semantic contribution of these phrases into a formal language like that of the Discourse Representation Theory. First, that these phrases are genuinely ambivalent, sometimes contributing only a referential condition ([DENOTING EXPRESSION (t)]), as in (86)-(88), sometimes a relational (durative) one as well ([t ⊆ ev]), as in (89)-(90). Second, in order to avoid ambivalence, that they are always mere time-denoting expressions, and occur with a null locating operator Ø, with the durative value of e.g. throughout, when in adjunct position, as in (89)-(90); in this analysis (parallel to the one described in section 1, apropos sentences like (13), but with a null durative, rather than non-durative, locating connective), they would always contribute merely a referential condition ([DENOTING EXPRESSION (t)]), with the locating relation ([t ⊆ ev]) triggered by Ø [+DURATIVE] in adjuncts. I will not attempt to argue for any of these hypotheses here, but leave the issue for further research. Table 2 below summarizes the exceptional possibilities concerning the use of locating connectives in the six nominal or nominal-like contexts that have been presented before. It shows, in a very graphic way, the heterogeneous and somewhat unstable syntactic and semantic behaviour within the class of locating connectives, arguably indicative of various degrees of grammaticalization, that we have been alluding to.

Conclusions
In this paper, I argued that temporal and spatial phrases expressing location need to be distinguished from those conveying mere temporal or spatial reference, and that -although a large set of expressions exhibit an ambivalent behaviour (notably those with prepositional heads such as antes or dentro) -these two classes (locating vs. referential) suffice for a comprehensive categorisation of the relevant sequences. The postulation of null locating prepositions was instrumental in technically formulating this categorisation. Furthermore, I showed that the two classes are quite varied in Portuguese, forming subclasses, and exhibiting  (1) a few anomalous cases found in corpora (2) always with elimination of the first element of the discontinuous connective (3) often with elimination of the first element of the discontinuous connective; marginally, no elimination may take place (e.g. marcar para de. . . a) interesting syntactic patterns, indicative of linguistic variation and change. Asymmetries between temporal and spatial referential expressions -which otherwise behave quite similarly -were observed apropos complex connectives like cima de, baixo de or trás de, which lack exact temporal counterparts (though elements like meados de are possible candidates). Signs of linguistic change were noted in the lack of autonomous value of the initial preposition (por, para, de, a) of sequences like por cima de, para trás de, detrás de, and -in Brazilian Portuguese -atrás de. Signs of anomaly, the archetypical herald of linguistic change, were found in present-day newspaper articles regarding the use of the locating preposition durante ('during'). All in all, the use of temporal and spatial prepositions, or preposition-like connectives, of the locating/referential domain generates an intricate taxonomy in Portuguese, with subclasses presenting relatively fuzzy or unstable boundaries. The results of this paper -which attempts to shed some light on previously unaddressed or not fully understood phenomena -are easy to generalize to other languages (e.g. in the Romance and Germanic families) where similar grammatical patterns can be observed.