An Overview on Portuguese Nominalisation

Abstract:

We discuss nominalizations in Portuguese formed by the suffix -ura, as pintura (painting), magistratura (magistracy) and gordura (fat). We have done a corpus-based description of the behavior of these nominal forms and proposed a type ontology to categorize them. We have parted from all the nouns formed by -ura which are present in OpenWordNet-PT and checked them in three famous Portuguese dictionaries (Porto Dictionary, Caldas Aulete Dictionary and Houaiss Dictionary). Then we analyzed their use in context in Corpus Brasileiro, a corpus which has more than 1 billion words extracted from various textual genders. In order to offer a rich description, we also tested all words formed by -ura in co-predication contexts with at least three native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese with no knowledge of linguistic study theories to check if their types could be co-predicated. Although our main goal was to produce a corpus-based description on those nouns, we have found few possible generalizations considering the type-structure of -ura forms. More than that, our tests on co-predication show that may be the frequency of use of a given word has a special role on the acceptability of co-predication between different senses of a nominalization.

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BibTeX:

@inproceedings{tytles-2015,
  author = {Real, Livy and Rademaker, Alexandre},
  title = {An Overview on Portuguese Nominalisation},
  pdflink1 = {/files/tytles-2015.pdf},
  booktitle = {Workshop on TYpe Theory and LExical Semantics},
  year = {2015},
  month = aug,
  address = {Barcelona}
}