Algumas observações sobre a flexão em número das estruturas N1N2 em português contemporâneo

This paper deals with structures consisting of two side-by-side substantives (N1N2) that are not connected with a preposition (e.g. palavra-chave; estados membros) in contemporary Portuguese. There are various conceptions of these structures; authors usually attempt to define the compound noun in order to distinguish it from simple nominal groups and then to create a typology and classification of these structures. This study is focused on the realization of plural forms of N1N2 structures from the statistical and descriptive point of view. These can be formed mainly as follows: 1. both nouns receive the mark of plural (e.g. estados membros); 2. only the first noun receives the plural (e.g. palavras-chave). The examples provided by the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese (CRPC) show that it is necessary to consider not only the number of unique tokens but also their frequency. Considering the occurrence of the most frequent tokens, it is possible to state that the structures featuring a plural marker on N1 only are more common in contemporary Portuguese. The abovementioned results show that any kind of linguistic analysis should consider the language corpus with all the options of research it provides.