MORPHOLOGICAL COMPOUNDS IN THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE (16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES):
A CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH
Morphology; compounding; morphological compounds; history of the Portuguese language
This research whose focus is the morphological compounding in Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries aims to contribute to describing this phenomenon from a historical perspective. In this way, we aim to expand studies on the word formation process during the earliest periods of Portuguese language, especially on compounding. To this end, we investigate relevant issues to morphological compounds, the connecting vowel role, the boundaries between compounding and affixation and productivity. In addition, we adopted theoretical and methodological assumptions of Construction Morphology, so we apply the concepts of construction and scheme, ideas that generative theory did not support. For the corpus, we gathered the morphological compounds on the basis of 22 texts selected from Corpus Histórico do Português Tycho Brahe, a resource which contains texts in Portuguese written by authors that were born between 1380 and 1978.