Lexical creations in the use of diminutives: an analysis of gender errors and phonological adaptations

• Grant number: 21/08280-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2022
• End date: January 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Psycholinguistics
• Principal Investigator: Indaiá de Santana Bassani
• Grantee: Geovana Viana Queiroz
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

From a rationalist approach to language acquisition, this research is going to study the occurrence of lexical creations by children undergoing language acquisition in the production of diminutives. For such, the aim of this study is to explain the production of such creations from phonological adaptations, besides exploring the relationship that gender tags have with them. Moreover, for the analysis of the productions, a data collection of children from the corpus Santos will be performed, corpus from a partnership between Unifesp and the project "Analysis of phonetic and phonological systems", performed by Language Acquisition Studies Laboratory at the University of São Paulo, followed by a data cataloging of morphosyntactic properties found in the creation so that it is possible to calculate the occurrences among the diminutives. Existing work theories will be taken into account for the production of this research, like the ones of diminutives and evaluative suffixes in general (Villalva, 1994; Bisol, 2010; Costa and Minussi, 2019) and the one the definition of lexical creations (Moreira and Baia, 2017). After the fulfillment of this research, we hope that it integrates the small but growing list of works already done about the acquisition of morphology of Brazilian Portuguese and that it also contributes to future works that will be made about this subject. (AU)