Locality restrictions on the interpretation of Brazilian Portuguese diminutives and augmentatives: consequences to the Encyclopedia

• Grant number: 24/18828-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ana Paula Scher
• Grantee: Marcela Nunes Costa
• Supervisor: David Embick
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Pennsylvania, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/13132-4 - The properties of the Encyclopedia in Distributed Morphology: the place of semantics in a syntactic theory, BP.DR

Abstract

Distributed Morphology (Halle; Marantz, 1993) is a syntactic model for the formation of words and larger constituents that distributes morphological, phonological and semantic properties contained in the Lexicon into three non-generative lists which store, respectively, the theoretical primitives - roots and morphosyntactic features -, the rules of correspondence between the syntactic output and the phonological representations, and the non-linguistic contents. The third List, the Encyclopedia, has received the least treatment and systematization in the literature to date, and its properties are not well established. This project addresses the formation of diminutives and augmentatives in Brazilian Portuguese through the relevant suffixes available in that language. A first approach to the treatment of these data assumes semantic compositionality as continuous (first introduced in Bassani and Costa (2024)), once diminutives and augmentatives may present compositional, quasi-compositional and idiosyncratic readings. Based on this variation of the types of meaning and on the syntactic locality domains that may affect interpretation (Marantz, 2001, 2013; Embick, 2010), we aim to discuss the structural limits to the idiosyncratic meaning derivation in complex forms and to highlight the organization of the Encyclopedia in the Distributed Morphology model.