@inproceedings{vaz-2026-que,
title = "Que ao mestre vai mat{\'a}-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in {P}ortuguese across time",
author = "Vaz, Helena Rodrigues Menezes de Oliveira",
editor = "Souza, Marlo and
de-Dios-Flores, Iria and
Santos, Diana and
Freitas, Larissa and
Souza, Jackson Wilke da Cruz and
Ribeiro, Eug{\'e}nio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of {P}ortuguese ({PROPOR} 2026) - Vol. 1",
month = apr,
year = "2026",
address = "Salvador, Brazil",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.9/",
pages = "93--102",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-387-6",
abstract = "This work investigates Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), specifically a-marked objects, or prepositional accusatives (PP-ACCs), across four variables: semantic requirements, constituent order, verb semantics, and textual genre.An optimized parsing model was trained to recognize instances of PP-ACCs and automatically annotate historical documents for these objects for the Tycho Brahe and Colonia corpora. Contrary to expectations based on the low frequency of these objects and prior diachronic studies on European Portuguese (EP), our results reveal that PP-ACCs remain present in BP from the 18th century onward. Our findings confirm previous patterns for EP and present textual genre (specifically, narrative texts and theater plays) as a possible relevant variable, but warrants further investigation. Constituent order was proved to be less significant than previously suggested. This work also reveals methodological challenges in using computational models and NLP tools for research in historical Portuguese."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Que ao mestre vai matá-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in Portuguese across time
%A Vaz, Helena Rodrigues Menezes de Oliveira
%Y Souza, Marlo
%Y de-Dios-Flores, Iria
%Y Santos, Diana
%Y Freitas, Larissa
%Y Souza, Jackson Wilke da Cruz
%Y Ribeiro, Eugénio
%S Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1
%D 2026
%8 April
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Salvador, Brazil
%@ 979-8-89176-387-6
%F vaz-2026-que
%X This work investigates Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), specifically a-marked objects, or prepositional accusatives (PP-ACCs), across four variables: semantic requirements, constituent order, verb semantics, and textual genre.An optimized parsing model was trained to recognize instances of PP-ACCs and automatically annotate historical documents for these objects for the Tycho Brahe and Colonia corpora. Contrary to expectations based on the low frequency of these objects and prior diachronic studies on European Portuguese (EP), our results reveal that PP-ACCs remain present in BP from the 18th century onward. Our findings confirm previous patterns for EP and present textual genre (specifically, narrative texts and theater plays) as a possible relevant variable, but warrants further investigation. Constituent order was proved to be less significant than previously suggested. This work also reveals methodological challenges in using computational models and NLP tools for research in historical Portuguese.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.9/
%P 93-102
Markdown (Informal)
[Que ao mestre vai matá-lo? The evolution of prepositional accusatives in Portuguese across time](https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.9/) (Vaz, PROPOR 2026)
ACL