A study of the nominalization in Brazilian Portuguese base don neological lexical units

Author(s)

Bruno Oliveira Maroneze

• 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: 2006-02-08

Examining board members

Ieda Maria Alves; Maria Aparecida Barbosa; Maria Tereza Camargo Biderman

• Advisor: Ieda Maria Alves

Abstract

Bearing in mind that the analysis of neological lexical units has much to contribute to word-formation sdudies, we attempt, in the present work, based on the theoretical models of Bybee (1988) and Langacker (1987, 1991), to describe an aspect of Brazilian Portuguese word-formation: the so-called nominals (abstract nouns derived from verbs). We address the usage tendencies and restrictions of each nominalizing suffix (with emphasis on -ção, -mento, -agem, -da and -nc(i)a), as well as the so-called “regressive derivation". We also describe certain characteristics of this kind of word-formation, such as: semantic (polysemy, semantic specialization etc.), syntactic (valency, support-verbs etc.) and discursive (text formality, textual cohesion etc.). Then, we attempt to show how the nominalizing suffixes and the nominals are described in Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries. Based on a neologism database collected from journalistic texts published between 1993 and 2000, we analyze about 170 neological nominals, in order to verify if these formations follow the above described usage tendencies and restrictions, and if it is possible to detect new tendencies. We have observed, among other minor characteristics, that: the suffix -ção, the most frequent nominalizing suffix, can be combined with second-conjugation verbs, a phenomenon attested only very recently in the Portuguese language; the suffixes -ção and -agem have presented colloquial or playful connotations, especially the so-called iterative -ção; the forms -nça and -ncia are being used with diverging connotations, which can indicate that they should not be analyzed as allomorphic forms of the same suffix. Finally, we propose a way of describing these neological nominals, to be used in the Dicionário de Neologismos do Português Brasileiro Contemporâneo (Década de 90) (Dictionary of Neologisms of Contemporary (90’s) Brazilian Portuguese. (AU)