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home / papers / 2026 / Que ao mestre vai matá-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in Portuguese across time

Que ao mestre vai matá-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in Portuguese across time

Paper · 2026 · Helena Rodrigues Menezes de Oliveira Vaz

Summary

Prepositional accusatives (PP-ACCs) are direct objects marked with a, a form of Differential Object Marking. They have been studied diachronically mainly for European Portuguese (EP). Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has received little attention, largely because few annotated historical BP texts exist. To fill this gap, the author compiled a balanced mini-corpus from the Tycho Brahe and Colonia corpora. She then trained a SpaCy parsing model using the UD scheme and combined it with a rule-based filter. Together, these automatically flagged candidate PP-ACC sentences in unannotated documents, which were then checked by hand. The resulting data were analysed for semantic properties, constituent order, verb semantics and textual genre.

The results confirm the known 17th-century peak in EP. In BP, the construction peaks in the 18th century and is more frequent than in EP afterwards, so it did not vanish as earlier work suggested. Narrative texts and theater plays appear to favour PP-ACCs, while word order matters less than previously claimed. The study also shows that current NLP tools struggle with historical Portuguese.

Key points

  • Mini-corpus: 51 files (28 EP, 23 BP). Syntactically annotated Tycho Brahe texts were used for training, and only unannotated texts were used for the linguistic analysis.
  • Gold standard: Penn Treebank annotations were replaced with UD parses. A total of 693 PP-ACCs were corrected manually in Arborator-Grew.
  • Model training:
    • The first model used 1,142 sentences (Bosque + Portinari + Tycho Brahe) and reached a LAS of 64.42.
    • Two later models used 2,492 sentences, combining Colonia sentences parsed with Stanza and Tycho Brahe data. They reached LAS scores of 86.06 and 83.94, with an OBJ F-score of up to 81.36.
  • Semantic behaviour: BP tolerated [-animate] and [-specific] marked objects more readily than EP.
  • Psych verbs: In this data, PP-ACCs with Psych verbs declined in EP and were absent by the 19th century. This contrasts with Calindro (2024), and the author attributes the difference largely to differing verb-class definitions.

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 Helena Rodrigues Menezes de Oliveira Vaz. 2026. Que ao mestre vai matá-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in Portuguese across time. 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{vaz2026que,
  title = {{Que ao mestre vai matá-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in Portuguese across time}},
  author = {Helena Rodrigues Menezes {de Oliveira Vaz}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.9/}
}

References

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