A proposal of coextensiveness between technical term, nominal group, and lexical item in Brazilian Portuguese

a study based on corpus linguistics’ software within the framework of systemic-functional theory

Abstract

Objective: Drawing on Pearson (1998) and using corpus linguistics tools available for Brazilian Portuguese, we report on a study aimed at exploring to what extent the concepts of technical term, nominal group and lexical item are coextensive in Brazilian Portuguese. Method: A corpus of academic articles on the experiential domain of Diabetes Mellitus self-care was compiled and queried in AntConc, a concordancing software (ANTHONY, 2019). Using as a reference corpus CALIBRA (FIGUEREDO; PAGANO; FERREGUETTI, 2014), three keywords were extracted analysed with AntConc tool clusters/n-grams, considering clusters/n-grams with a minimum number of ten occurrences. Results: Analysis of clusters/n-grams to the right and left of each of the selected keywords showed that technical term, nominal group and lexical item cannot always coextensive. The use of cluster/n-grams tool can be considered effective to search for lexical items that are coextensive to the order of the nominal group, due to the existence of at least one nominal group in each cluster/n-gram analyzed. Conclusion: Although the programs used by Pearson (1998) are not fully available to Brazilian Portuguese, a systemic-functional approach to nominal group and lexical item together with the tools of the concordancing software used in this paper proved to be efficient for the analysis herein proposed.