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| Author(s): |
Indaiá de Santana Bassani
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2009-07-01 |
| Examining board members: |
Ana Paula Scher;
Esmeralda Vailati Negrao;
Luiz Carlos da Silva Schwindt
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| Advisor: | Ana Paula Scher |
| Abstract | |
From an etymologycal point of view, the Denominal Verb is the one that derives historically from a nominal base. Dictionaries consider a verb as denominal when its cognate nominal form is older than the verbal one in language records. Thus, there are two ways of treating what is called denominal verb, regarding the relation between the noun and the verb: from a synchronic or from a dyachronic perspective. Since the description of this class is rather misleading, it is necessary to make a distinction between etymological and synchronic criteria in the definition of what a denominal verb is. For these reasons, the aim of this work is i) to find out synchronic and formal criteria to know which denominal verbs, from a diachronic point of view, can also be considered as such under a synchronic analysis of word formation and ii) in which cases can real reasons be found for the abandonment of the label denominal. We started from a sample of 4.548 etymologically denominal verbs in Portuguese, collected from Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa, and, due to a frequency criteria, we reduced it to 95 verbs that constitute, in fact, the object of this study. We submmited all the verbs to structural tests of sentence formation suggested by Kyparsky (1987), Hale & Keyser (2002) and Arad (2003), namely: Inchoative- Causative Alternation (Test 1); Middle Alternation (Test 2); Presence of Periphrastic Expression (Test 3); Presence of Cognate Object (Test 4); Presence of Cognate Adjunct (Test 5); Presence of Hiponimous and Hiperonimous Adjunction (Test 6).The sentences were submitted to the judgement of 40 native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The results pointed to heterogeneity in the behaviour of the general class of denominal verbs. To sum up, there is a group of verbs to which the tests indicated a nominal stage in the derivation of the verb (grammaticality for tests 3 (4), 5 and 6) and another group of verbs to which the tests did not indicate the presence of that nominal stage (agrammaticality for tests 3, 5 and 6). There are verbs that do and do not participate in alternations (gramaticality and agramaticality for tests 1 and 2) and, finally, there is a group of verbs for which one meaning indicates a nominal stage and the other meaning indicates the absence of such a nominal stage. After observing some analysis under lexicalist theories based on word formation rules (Basílio, 1993) or under lexico-syntactic approaches such as Hale & Keyser (2002), we could offer an analysis under which it is possible to distinguish the so-called denominal verbs in two classes: i) those represented by structures that include a nominal stage in the derivation (denominals), ii) those represented by structures in which the verb is derived directly from roots. This analysis is based on the Distributed Morphology model (Halle & Marantz, 1993; Harley & Noyer, 1999), more specifically, on Arad (2003), Marantz (2008) and Harley (2005). Our first step was to separate the two big groups: the first containing verbs that are derived from the categorization of a root () by a noun (n) and, then, by a verb (v) (synchronic denominal structures), and the second group containing verbs that are derived from the direct categorization of a root () by a verb (v) (non-denominal structures). In the first group, the denominal one, we observed that the sentences containing such verbs presented different syntactic behaviors and we suggested different kinds of structures: alternating, non-alternating and location/locatum. In sequence, we discussed some verbs that led us to suggest that they can be formed either as denominal verbs or as root-derived ones. We could then represent the structure of different types of so-called denominal verbs regarding their syntactic behavior and the relation they establish with the noun formed by the same root. Finally, the major theoretic contribution of this work is that we improved in clarifying the difference between a synchronic and a dyachronic word formation process, showing that the historical explanation is not always the single possibility. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 07/02304-6 - Training and interpretation of denominal verbs in Brazilian Portuguese |
| Grantee: | Indaiá de Santana Bassani |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |