Principles underlying the experiential and the logical structures of the nominal group in Portuguese

Abstract

This paper presents a description of the Portuguese nominal group both for its experiential and logical organizations and carries out a contrastive study of English and Portuguese nominal group features. Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) state that the nominal group can be seen as a multivariate structure (experiential), in which elements play different functional roles and as a univariate structure (logical), generated by iteration. Consequently, the most comprehensive form to approach how the nominal group is organized is to look at these two structures at the same time. In order to do so, a corpus was collected based on the socio-semiotic processes typology (see Herke-Couchman, 2006) and nominal group elements were annotated. The analysis was carried out and patterns of functions and relations were retrieved. It was possible to identify features of elements taking part in the experiential and logical structures of the nominal group as well as their functional configuration. In the contrastive study with English, it was possible to understand how these systems differ when more delicate investigation takes place. Results indicate recurrent grammatical features and lead to a possible description of the nominal group in Portuguese – i.e., the elements that compose it as well as how they are functionally organized.