A comparison of syntactic patterns of Brazilian Portuguese and English: using comparable corpora of museum texts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze two corpora (one in Brazilian Portuguese and another English), from PUCRS’ Science and Technology Museum, to unveil which of these languages could be rendered to be more or less syntactically and rhetorically elaborate. The corpora were processed on Natural Language Processing tools, such as NILC-Metrix, Coh-Metrix 3.0 and AntConc. Results point to the feature regarding the higher number of words before the main verb as the main factor rendering syntactic and rhetoric elaboration and, consequently, more complexity in the Portuguese corpus.