Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / A Lexicon-Grammar of Brazilian Portuguese Predicative Adjectives

A Lexicon-Grammar of Brazilian Portuguese Predicative Adjectives

Paper · 2026 · Ryan Martinez, Jorge Baptista and Oto Araújo Vale

Summary

Portuguese has no lexical-syntactic resource that systematically links the meanings of predicative adjectives to the syntactic constructions they allow. The adjective fofo, for example, means "kind" in one set of patterns and "fluffy" in another. The authors address this gap for Brazilian Portuguese. They combine Zellig Harris's Transformational Operator Grammar with Maurice Gross's Lexicon-Grammar formalism, in which entries are table rows and properties are binary (+/−) columns.

Starting from the 7,000 most frequent adjectives in the Brazilian part of PtTenTen20, retrieved via Sketch Engine, they filtered out two groups:

  • forms regularly derivable from verbs, such as passive participles and many -nte, -or and -vel adjectives;
  • non-predicative adjectives.

The remaining items were split into one entry per distributional pattern, using intuition, corpus evidence and dictionaries. Each entry was then coded for 36 properties, including argument structure, copula choice, prepositions, transformations, echo complements, appropriate nouns and semantic roles.

The result is a machine-readable lexicon of 3,161 entries, partially validated by human judgements. It can support NLP tasks and help refine annotation guidelines.

Key points

  • Coverage: 3,161 predicative adjective entries, each annotated with 36 syntactic properties, are publicly available. Separately, 2,567 adjectives were classified as non-predicative.
  • Argument structure: One-argument adjectives without a clausal subject (class AN0) dominate, with 1,729 entries (54.7%). Transitive adjectives without a clausal complement (AN2) account for 291 entries (9.2%).
  • Echo complements: da parte de N0 occurs with 502 adjectives, para com N1 with 211 and para N0 with 204. The modo como restructuring (ModoRais) applies to 136 adjectives.
  • Appropriate nouns: The most common are comportamento (1,380 entries, 43.66%), discurso (1,355), mente (1,132), aparência (436) and origem (330).
  • Validation: 31 respondents judged 32 sentence pairs covering 16 adjectives. Agreement with the lexicon reached a precision of 0.831 and an accuracy of 0.8.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 works

Cite

Cite as Ryan Martinez, Jorge Baptista and Oto Araújo Vale. 2026. A Lexicon-Grammar of Brazilian Portuguese Predicative Adjectives. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{martinez2026lexicon,
  title = {{A Lexicon-Grammar of Brazilian Portuguese Predicative Adjectives}},
  author = {Ryan Martinez, Jorge Baptista and Oto Araújo Vale},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.60/}
}

References

33 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Jorge Baptista. 2005. Sintaxe dos predicados nominais com ser de. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian & Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Lisboa. find
  2. Jorge Baptista and Nuno Mamede. 2020. Dicionário Gramatical de Verbos do Português Europeu. Universidade do Algarve. find
  3. Francisco da Silva Borba. 2002. Dicionário de usos do português do Brasil. (Editora Ática). find
  4. Paula Cristina Quaresma da Fonseca Carvalho. 2007. Análise e representação de construções adjectivais para processamento automático de texto: adjectivos intransitivos humanos. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de Lisboa. find
  5. João Malaca Casteleiro. 1981. Sintaxe transforma-cional do adjectivo – regência das construções completivas. INIC, Lisbon. find
  6. Gohsran Chung. 2003. Analyse des constructions à double nominatif/accusatif par l’opération de restructuration en coréen Classification syntaxique des constructions à adjectifs sôngsang. Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris-Est. find
  7. Helena Maria Serras Reis Silva Freire. 1995. Deter-minação e formalização das propriedades sintácticas de adjectivos terminados em-vel. Master’s thesis, Universidade de Lisboa. find
  8. Maurice Gross. 1975. Méthodes en syntaxe: régime des constructions complétives. Herman, Paris. find
  9. Lélia Picabia. 1978. Les constructions adjectivales en français: systématique transformationnelle, volume 11. Librairie Droz. find
  10. Maurice Gross. 1981. Les bases empiriques de la notion de prédicat sémantique. Langages, 63:7–52. find
  11. Maurice Gross. 1988. Methods and tactics in the construction of a lexicon-grammar. Linguistics in the morning calm, 2:177–197. find
  12. Maurice Gross. 1996a. Les verbes supports d’adjectifs et le passif. Langages, pages 8–18. find
  13. Maurice Gross. 1996b. Lexicon-Grammar. In Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories, pages 244–259. Pergamon. find
  14. Alain Guillet and Christian Leclère. 1981. Restructuration du groupe nominal. Langages, 63:99–125. find
  15. Zellig Sabbettai Harris. 1968. Mathematical Structures of Language. John Wiley & Sons, New York. find
  16. Zellig Sabbettai Harris. 1976. Notes du cours de syntaxe. Éditions du Seuil, Paris. find
  17. Baholisoa Simone Rahaga. 1995. Lexique-grammaire du malgache: constructions adjectivales. Ph.D. thesis, Paris 7. find
  18. Graça Rio-Torto. 2006. Para uma gramática do adjectivo. Alfa: Revista de Linguística, 50(2):103–129. find
  19. Elisávet Sklavoúnou. 1997. Etude comparée de la nominalisation des adjectifs en grec moderne et en français. Ph.D. thesis, Paris 8. find
  20. Rui Talhadas, Nuno Mamede, and Jorge Baptista. 2013. Semantic roles for portuguese verbs. In 32nd International Conference on Lexis and Grammar, pages 127–132. find
  21. Freiderikos Valetopoulos. 2003. Les adjectifs prédicatifs en grec et en français: de l’analyse syntaxique à l’élaboration des classes sémantiques. Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris 13. find
  22. Zellig Sabbettai Harris. 1982. A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York. find
  23. Rita Veloso and Eduardo B Paiva Raposo. 2013. Adjetivo e sintagma adjetival. In Gramática do português, volume 2, pages 1359–1493. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. find
  24. Zellig Sabbettai Harris. 1991. Theory of Language and Information: A Mathematical Approach. Clarendon Press, Oxford. find
  25. Zeno Vendler. 1968. Adjectives and nominalizations. Mouton, Paris. find
  26. A. Kilgarriff, M. Jakubíček, J. Pomikalek, T.B. Sardinha, and P. Whitelock. 2014. Pttenten: A corpus for portuguese lexicography. In T.B. Sardinha and T. de Lurdes São Bento Ferreira, editors, Working with Portuguese Corpora, pages 111–128. Bloomsbury Academic. find
  27. Éric Laporte. 1992. Adjectifs en-ant dérivés de verbes. Langue française, 96:30–43. find
  28. Eric Laporte. 1997. L’analyse de phrases adjectivales par rétablissement de noms appropriés. Langages, 31(126):79–104. find
  29. Danielle Leeman and Serge Meleuc. 1990. Verbes en tables et adjectifs en -able. Langue française, 87:30– 51. find
  30. Simona Messina. 2019. The predicative adjective and its propositional arguments: A lexicon-grammar classification. Lingvisticæ Investigationes, 42(2):234–261. find
  31. Annie Meunier. 1981. Nominalisations d’adjectifs par verbes supports. Ph.D. thesis, Paris 7. find
  32. Métiyé Meydan. 1995. Transformations des constructions verbales et adjectivales: élaboration du lexique-grammaire des adjectifs déverbaux. Ph.D. thesis, Paris 7. find
  33. Jee-Sun Nam. 1996. Classification syntaxique des constructions adjectivales en coréen. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/martinez-2026-lexicon-grammar-brazilian-portuguese-predicative/