Collocations in Portuguese: A corpus-based approach to lexical patterns

Collocations and, more generally, multiword expressions, have been extensively studied for the English language and a large set of resources are available in terms of linguistic description and tools for language learning. On the contrary, combinatorial resources for Portuguese are scarce, although specific types of collocations, such as light verb constructions, nominal compounds and proverbs, have been the topic of many studies. This chapter reviews different theoretical perspectives on multiword expressions and collocations in Portuguese and presents in more detail the results of the COMBINA-PT project, a corpus-based approach to the study of collocations.