Morfologia não-concatenativa em português: os portmanteaux

Abstract

Morphologists working on Brazilian Portuguese have generally neglected the study of non-concatenative morphological operations, such as blending, acronym formation and truncation, perhaps influenced by the opinions of normative grammarians, who claim that these mechanisms of word-formation are arbitrary and unpredictable (cf. Basílio 1987, Sandmann 1991). In this paper, I will concentrate on blending (portmanteaus morphemes) in Brazilian Portuguese and show that the process involved in their creation are quite regular. A formal account of this phenomenon, involving both its morphological and phonological aspects, will be provided. The paper is organized as follows: in section I, I give a description of the phenomenon of blending, a discussion of its cross-linguistic relevance and of the way it is formally treated in the literature. In section II, I will sketch the essentials of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), more particular the version of OT know as Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince, various publications), which will serve as the theoretical framework of my study. Section 3 discusses the general aspects and the constraints that are active in blending formation. Finally, section 4 contains the concluding discussion and some suggestion for the further research. It also contains a list of Brazilian Portuguese blending examples.