Eckhard Bick - VISL

(6e) politiquês
"política" N M S
"político" N M S ###
The Portuguese successor of the Latin present participle ending, '-nte', does not have
the broad open class productivity of an inflexion morpheme, and is therefore best
termed a suffix in modern Portuguese. Also, '-nte' words have in many instances
become lexicalised (i.e. dictionary-listed) nouns, suggesting that the original,
attributive, participle reading is not really "alive" the same way, say, the past
participle, '-do', is (with its full productivity for all verbs and its broad attributive
potential). Thus, 'presidente', for example, must be regarded as a full noun, rather
than a participle, since it can't even be used as an adjective any longer.
(7) galopante
" galopar" ADJ M/F S
"galopar" N M/F S
Of course, more than one suffix may occur in the same word form:
(8a) halterofilistas
"haltere" N M/F P
(8b) peemedebistas
"P" N M/F P
(8c) percussionistas
"percussão" N M/F P
"percussão" N M/F P
(8d) viabilizou
"viável" V PS 3S IND VFIN
In (8b), multiple suffixation analysis is used as a technique to tackle productive
derivation in abbreviations. The real root here is 'PMDB', a political party. The
mechanism is described in detail in chapter 2.2.4.1.
Multiple suffixation analysis can also be a solution for "naturalised" loan
words, like in (8c), or for capturing Latin-based etymological stem alternations, as in
(8d).
2.2.3.4 The prefix lexicon
(1)
1 2 3 4 5
prefix form base word class combination output derivation
condition condition rules class and semantics
a C asv [CAUSE] DERP a-[STATE]
a C a DERP a- [ANT]
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