Truncated word formation in Brazilian Portuguese: a process applied to the root

• Grant number: 11/10818-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: September 26, 2011
• End date: August 12, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ana Paula Scher
• Grantee: Ana Paula Scher
• Host Investigator: Andrew Ira Nevins
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University College London (UCL), England

Abstract

The present research project suggests the analysis of truncated forms such as "forasta", a synonym for "forasteiro", in Brazilian Portuguese (PB), or "cafeta", a synonym for "cafeteria", in Peninsular Spanish (EP), under the Distributed Morphology (MD) perspective, a model proposed in Halle & Marantz (1993), and its most recent developments, presented in Siddiqi (2009) and Embick (2010), for example. Its main aim is to identify, as much as possible, some regularity in this truncated word formation process. It also intends to offer an analysis for the phenomena, based on the MD postulates, among which is the one which says that all word formation processes are syntactic and start in the root. (AU)