Collocation of the Adjective in Portuguese Nominal Syntagmata

This paper aims to present a recent research on collocation of adjectives inside nominal syntagmata. It examines how their collocation is influenced by diverse linguistic factors, mostly of semantic, syntactic, idiomatic or even prosodic character. The research was based on the “Corpus do Português” (www.corpusdoportugues.org) and used statistical methods to prove our hypotheses about idiomatic and phonetic influence on adjectives’ positioning. The paper also includes a short discussion of problems encountered during the data processing, like weaknesses in POS definition and distinction (noun / adjective, adjective / quantifier) due to their morphological similarities. Statistical instruments and approaches are also mentioned.