Lexique-Grammaire du Portugais

The analysis of 2000 nominal predicates supported by the Vsup =: estar in Portuguese confirmed Z.S. Harris' hypothesis that there are nouns which form the nucleus of sentences: sentences with support verbs. In a support structure, the support verb — in our case estar — carries flexional morphemes: it does not have a characteristic distribution nor much meaning on its own, and it is the supported noun that selects the other constituents (in the same way as ordinary verbs do). In fact, predicative nouns (nominalizations or autonomous nouns) can be analysed and classified as ordinary verbs. Like verbs, they have subjects and complements: the arguments of N. We could therefore integrate those 2000 nouns into the Lexicon-grammar of Portuguese. Since they behave as the main element in sentence structures, they were described by the same type of matrices (Tab 1, Tab 2) that were used for verbs, but in this case the entries are nouns.