Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla, to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes. The spelling of Portuguese is largely phonemic, but some phonemes can be spelled in more than one way. In ambiguous cases, the correct spelling is determined through a combination of etymology with morphology and tradition so there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between...

A predicative expression (or just predicative) is (part of) a clause predicate. The term is used more specifically to denote expressions that typically follow a copula (= linking verb), e.g. be, seem, appear, or that appear as a second complement of a certain type of verb, e.g. call, make, name, etc. The most frequently acknowledged types of predicative expressions are predicative adjectives (also predicate adjectives) and predicative nominals (also predicate nominals). The main trait of all predicative expressions is that they serve to express a property that is assigned to a "subject", whereby...