Antonímia nos adjetivos descritivos do Português do Brasil: uma proposta de análise e representação

Abstract

Among the most important lexical semantic relations to the class of adjectives is antonymy, i. e., opposition of senses as in fat/thin . WordNet, a lexical database for English, both establishes semantic relationships (such as synonymy, hiperonymy, etc.) between words and presents the concept of indirect antonymy (via synonymy: obese=fat/thin) for adjectives. This type of antonymy has not been represented at WordNet.Br yet, the Brazilian Portuguese WordNet, and at Electronic Thesaurus for Brazilian Portuguese (TeP), which contains the WordNet.Br core synsets. Thus, this research aims to study the antonymy in adjectives of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), to contribute to the refinement of the TeP and of WordNet.Br s database. The study takes up the occurrences of the 100 most frequent adjectives in the Mac-Morpho corpus from the LacioWeb project, which contains newspaper articles of Folha de São Paulo of the year 1994 and has 1,167,183 tokens. The adjectives were extracted by the Unitex concordancer. The research is motivated by three questions ( when two adjectives have closely similar meanings, why do they not have the same antonym? ; if antonymy is so important, why do many descriptive adjectives seem to have no antonym? ; and how the direct antonymy can be established? ). The main objectives are: to establish a lexical network that relates direct antonymy between adjectives and indirect antonymy between the synonyms of each adjective and its antonyms and to implement them in TeP, refining the representation of antonymy.