Portuguese compounds

Abstract

This article presents an overview of compounding in Portuguese. Conceived as a plurilexematic unit used as a holistic denomination, a compound is characterized by lexical atomicity. The compound classes' continuum we propose is based on the morpho-lexical nature of the internal units (root, word) and on the (non) conformity of compound constructions with Portuguese syntactic templates. Since Portuguese compounds constitute a heterogeneous and bordering class, this analysis also focuses on the boundaries of compoundhood, namely those existing between compounds and phrasal nouns. This article also concentrates on the coordinative, subordinative, attributive and thematic relations between constituents and analyzes Portuguese compounds with respect to head(ness), its morphological, categorial and semantic nature. Finally, we stress the narrow relationship between internal constituency, headedness and inflectional patterns of Portuguese compounds.

The prosodic representation of composite structures in Brazilian Portuguese

“…Word–word compounds in (Brazilian) Portuguese can be formed from several distinct combinations of lexical categories (Lee 1997, Moreno 1997, Rio-Torto & Ribeiro 2012). Table 1 lists examples of word–word compounds in BP (the examples are orthographically transcribed except for stress, which is marked by an acute accent) [12]…”

Prepositions as relators in Italian Prepositional Compounds

“…PCs have been treated very differently in research on compounding and have also been labeled with many different terms (cf. Hennecke 2020), such as syntagmatic compounds (Buenafuentes de la Mata 2010), syntactic compounds (Rio-Torto & Ribeiro 2009), improper compounds (Kornfeld 2009), phrasal lexemes (Masini & Thornton 2007), frozen multiword units (Guevara 2012), lexicalized syntactic constructions (Villoing 2012), lexicalized phrases (Fradin 2009), syntactic words (Di Sciullo & Williams 1987).…”

Compostos NprepN no português arcaico: aspectos morfossintáticos

“…Para Marchand (1969( , apud KASTOVSKY, 2005, no entanto, todos os compostos são sintagmas e, como entidades gramaticais, precisam ser explicadas do ponto de vista da frase, em cujas relações sintáticas eles se espelham. Contudo, em algumas abordagens sobre a composição de palavras, é negado o estatuto de composto a determinados tipos de construções, principalmente NprepN e NA, que, no entanto, segundo estatística apresentada por Rio-Torto e Ribeiro (2012), constituem os padrões mais produtivos no português europeu contemporâneo. Em geral, a realização de flexão interna é invocada para evidenciar o estatuto sintático dessas construções, como em Booij (2005).…”