---
title: "A Lexicon-Grammar of Brazilian Portuguese Predicative Adjectives"
description: "Portuguese has no lexical-syntactic resource that systematically links the meanings of predicative adjectives to the syntactic… 33 references."
authors: ["Ryan Martinez", "Jorge Baptista", "Oto Araújo Vale"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.60/"
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summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/martinez-2026-lexicon-grammar-brazilian-portuguese-predicative/"
---
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# A Lexicon-Grammar of Brazilian Portuguese Predicative Adjectives

**Authors:** Ryan Martinez, [Jorge Baptista](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jorge-baptista/) and [Oto Araújo Vale](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/oto-araujo-vale/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/propor/) ([International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/propor/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.60/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.60.pdf)

## 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.*

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## 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.

```bibtex
@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/}
}
```

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## 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.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*