Abstract

DEBOWIAK, Przemyslaw. Notes on portuguese historical morphology: suffix *-ó. Diacrítica [online]. 2013, vol.27, n.1, pp.131-152. ISSN 0807-8967.

In Portuguese, there is a group of oxytone words ending in -ó (stressed [?]) that are neither loans, nor interjections, nor onomatopoeias. These are around thirty nouns of both grammatical genders, some of them used in everyday language (avó ‘grandmother’), others rarer, specialised and dialectal (eiró ‘eel’ or ‘small treshing-floor’), and others which have already fallen into disuse (lançó ‘lancette’). According to etymological sources, these terms were inherited from Latin and come from diminutives formed with suffixes -eolus / -a / -um and -iolus / -a / -um; in some cases, their origin was not studied. Based on a formal and semantic analysis of these words, the paper aims to demonstrate the existence of a suffix *-ó, still productive in Medieval Portuguese, that might have had a diminutive meaning, among others. The postulated suffix might have subsequently lost its vitality and is nowadays completely lexicalised in a reduced number of terms like the ones from the corpus.

Keywords : Portuguese; historical morphology; suffixal derivation; diminutive.

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