NN COMPOUNDS IN PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE (17th and 18th centuries)
Morphology. Compounding. NN compounds. 17th and 18th centuries. Language History.
Within the scope of historical morphology, this study investigates the Noun-Noun pattern, henceforth [NN]N (peixe-anjo), in two past synchronies of the Portuguese language. Although the [NN]N pattern is considered one of the most productive in contemporary Portuguese (RIBEIRO; RIO-TORTO, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2016; GONÇALVES, 2016), studies on composition in Old Portuguese (including the Galician-Portuguese period) have shown that this pattern is not productive at this stage (SANTOS, 2009; BORGES; SANTOS, 2017, 2020). Given the above, studies focusing on the [NN]N pattern are necessary to obtain knowledge about its development process throughout the history of the Portuguese language. As a result, this study seeks to identify, describe and analyze [NN]N compounds located in a document set from the 17th and 18th centuries. The corpus of analysis of this study consists of 10 texts from different textual genres, which are available in the Corpus Histórico do Português Tycho Brahe. In this discussion, the main theoretical contributions are the thesis of Santos (2009), regarding composition in Old Portuguese, including the [NN]N pattern, as well as the work of Ribeiro and Rio-Torto (2016), presenting a more comprehensive perspective on the phenomenon of composition and an analysis proposal developed and applied for Portuguese language compounds. Methodologically, this study bases mainly on the inductive approach (PRODANOV; FREITAS, 2013). Concerning the procedures, we surveyed the [NN]N compounds in the corpus, followed by a description and linguistic analysis. We understand, from the results, that there was no expressive growth of [NN]N compounds in the synchronies in question, and, realizing this, we hope for further studies on the subject.