The Nominal Group in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper, we follow basic systemic principles for language description – an axial perspective, text-based evidence and reasoning “from above”, “from roundabout” and “from below” – to provide a description of the nominal group in Brazilian Portuguese. Our description starts by presenting an overview of the nominal group seen “from above” and the ways it is related to items in register and entities in discourse semantics. Then, we approach the nominal group “from roundabout” and examine axis (its organization as system implicating configurations of structure). Through agnation we detail classification criteria between choices available and the way they can be abstracted from evidence in the structure. The nominal group systems proposed for Brazilian Portuguese are deixis, quantification, thing type, classification, epithesis and qualification. The general functions realizing features from these systems are respectively Deictic, Numerative, Thing, Classifier, Epithet and Qualifier. We simultaneously look at the nominal group “from below” to see how functions pre-select classes from the rank of word. Several word classes are pre-selected by nominal group functions, such as nouns, pronouns, articles, adjectives and numerals. Some functions are realized by word complexes and the nominal group also has the potential to embed phrases and clauses.