Learning verbal alternation from surface forms in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 23/11903-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2024
• End date: July 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Maria Filomena Spatti Sandalo
• Grantee: Lucas Pereira Eberle
• Supervisor: Michael Becker
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass Amherst), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/12853-4 - Effects of Hiatus Resolution on the verbal paradigm in Portuguese spoken in São Paulo, BP.DR

Abstract

This project aims to study some new trends in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) grammar concerning the verb endings ear and iar which conjugations might be undergoing the process of neutralization. In verb ending ear, whenever the vowel [e] is stressed, occurs an epenthesis of [j] between the vowels (/mape.o/, [maÈpej.Š] - 'I map it') and in unstressed positions the vowel is often raised to [i] (/mapeaR/, [mapiÈa~] - 'to map'). On the other hand, the ending iar, in general, maintains the hiatus in any position (/fatiaR/, [fatƒiÈa~] - 'to slice'; /fatio/, [faÈtƒi.Š] - 'I slice it'). This work focus on verbs from the ending iar that behave like verbs from the ear ending, for example, 'odiar' ('to hate') - /odio/, [oÈdej.Š] - 'I hate it'. Proposing an input for verbs from the iar ending seems complex, as there would be many exceptions, i.e., not economic. Thus, the split-base effect (Steriade, 1997), in which an expression is formed using more than one base as reference, guides the analysis of the phenomenon: verbs that do not alternate are those that have a stressed [i] in their nominal form, while those that alternate have unstressed [i], which is a similar pattern to the verbs from the ending ear. Sublexical Phonology (Allen & Becker, 2015) proves to be a good alternative for modeling this phenomenon, as it uses paradigms comparing a derivative form with a base. In addition, it is a constraint-based multiple-grammar approach to learning and productively applying morphophonological alternations. We also aim to demonstrate how verb alternations in BP are relevant to understanding the status of underlying representation in Phonology and enhance the Correspondence Theory and the split-base effect in noun-verb derivations. (AU)