This paper analyzes nominalizations in what concerns their polysemic and/or multifunctional value is Brazilian Portuguese. It assumes that nominaliza-tion is a paradigmatic association between nouns and verbs, and that deverbal nouns can have either a verbal or a nominal interpretation, depending on the con-text of occurrence. Under this assumption, the work analyzes occurrences of de-verbal nouns with the purpose of determining whether there is a prevalence of the predicative (verbal) function over the denotative (nominal) function. The results of the analysis, based upon a corpus of contemporary journalistic written lan-guage, show that the use of deverbal nouns in predicative function is more fre-quent than that of deverbal nouns in denotative function. These results corroborate the expectation that journalistic written language would favor the use of deverbal nouns for predication, so that the denotative function would be less required.