A morfologia prosódica e o comportamento transderivacional da hipocorização no português brasileiro

Resumo

In this paper, I analyse Brazilian Portuguese Hypocorization, inlight of the Prosodic Morphology model proposed by McCarthy &Prince (1990 and 1993). Agglutinative approaches refer to thisphenomenon as idiosyncratic, unpredictible and awkward,considering that the process deletes sound sequences ofanthroponims. Based on Prosodic Morphology, I argue against thishypothesis, showing that the process is highly regular if we consider(i) prosodic primitives and (ii) aspects of the phonology-morphologyinterface in Portuguese. By analyzing the phenomenon as a nonconcatenativeone, I claim that Hypocorization does not deletesound sequences of the base. Instead it is characterized by melodicsegment mapping of the first name onto a definite prosodic template.