We describe the syntactic-semantic behaviour of the verb cortar 'cut' in Brazilian Portuguese, observing how it may be a distributional verb, a support verb or a component of an idiom. The description applies the Lexicon-Grammar method defined by Gross (1975) in order to obtain reproductible results. It uses a corpus of 33 sentences drawn from our experience as a native speaker or found in the Web, and simplified without damaging their acceptability. This method considers the elementary sentence as minimal unit of meaning and makes it possible to elaborate formulae which comprise the representation of the subject and objects of these mininal units.
