Morphosyntactic Features and Morphophonology of dor- and nte-nominals in Brazilian Portuguese.

• Grant number: 08/00426-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): June 01, 2008
• Effective date (End): March 31, 2010
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ana Paula Scher
• Grantee: Alessandro Boechat de Medeiros
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to investigate two Brazilian Portuguese nominals: the dor-nominals and the nte-nominals. The study of such nominals contributes to the analysis and description of Portuguese deverbal nominals in general. Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997, 2001; henceforth DM) is the framework adopted here. One of the main theoretical assumption of this model is that the processes and operations involved in phrase-structuring are the same involved in word-formation. Such a framework shares many fundamental theoretical assumptions with the Principles and Parameters framework (Chomsky 1981) in its more recent version, the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 1998). Choosing DM will allow us to explain, in a more natural way, many syntactic and semantic properties of the nominals studied here through syntactic representations. In a deeper level, the research aims to probe properties of the human language faculty hidden in such structures.