Flexão nominal de gênero e classes formais em português brasileiro

Abstract

This work consists of an analysis and differentiation of final atonic morphemes in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), treated either as gender desinence or as nominal thematic vowel. We note, initially, two theoretical proposals. The first one is the proposal of Alcantara (2010) that distributes substantives into four formal groups. In this proposal, we observe strictly the final morpheme of words, that is, those classes have formal endings /o/, /a/, /e/ and /Ø/, respectively, numbered as I to IV. The other proposal comes from Henriques (2007). The author presumes the classification of words with gender desinence; however, there is scope for pairs of words in which the inflection of gender would not have a direct relationship. Here, our proposal formulates an alternative classification which shows the feature of animacy. The BP has two gender classes by which substantives are distributed. The first one would be the substantives with inflection, and the second one would be the substantives without inflection. In both cases it can be observed the presence of substantives with [± animated] feature. The class of substantives with inflection distributes its elements into two subclasses: substantives with motivated inflection and substantives with arbitrary inflection. Our proposal consists of an initial experimental study, based on the association between invented lexical items and also invented figures. The experiment consists of priming intermodal. In BP, the feature of animacy, thus, is taken into consideration, associating it with the gender desinences, while inanimacy would be related to the nominal thematic vowels. In the experiment we did not obtain meaningful data that associate the trait inanimacy nominal thematic vowels nominal.