Brazilian Portuguese Nominal Phrases Overview

What are Nominal Phrases Made Of?

 Nominal phrases are constructions built around a noun or noun-like pronoun. For example:

Todos os carros pretos. / All the black cars.

 

In that example, the center of it is “carros / cars” and everything around brings information about it. Nominal Phrases have three different parts: The Specifiers, the nucleus and the complements. In the example above we have:

 

-          Todos os = Specifiers;

-          Carros = Nucleus;

-          Pretos = Complement.

 

For each one of these parts we have a possible class of word. I organized all of them in the following table:

 

Table 1 – The Components of the Nominal Phrase

	Especifiers			Nucleus	Complements
	Pre-Specifiers	Central Specifiers	Post-Specifiers
	Definite Quantifiers	Displayers	Possessive Pronouns	Nouns	Adjectival Phrases
			Indefinite Quantifiers	Noun-Like Pronouns	Prepositioned Phrases
			Cardinal Definite Quantifiers
			Ordinal Definite Quantifiers

 

These classes are very restrict when it comes to placement, so you’ll see that I ordered them (from left to right) by how they place themselves inside a Nominal Phrase. The Definite Quantifiers always will come before the Displayers, for example. So you can read the table from the left to the right to understand its positioning and up to down to understand the possibilities.

The only exception is the complements, they can appear in different positions, but I’ll let that for a proper class about them.

Some words also can appear in more than one of those functions. For example the word “tal”: it can be used as a Displayer, meaning the same as “this” or “that”, pointing to the nucleus, for example “Tal coisa / That thing”, but it also can be used as a pronoun in the nucleus, for example “O tal / The one”.

One last rule about the construction of the nominal phrase is: you can’t combine definite words with indefinite words. There is just one class that express an “indefinite” sense: The Indefinite Quantifiers. So keep in mind that this group of words can’t combine with all other types of Specifiers. Also, some words can’t combine with another from the same group, I’ll describe that on each group section.

Stay tunned for the next posts where we'll take a deep look into all these classes.