Relations between word formations and morphological gender in Portuguese language

Abstract

Gender in Portuguese is usually associated with the sex or gender of the referents, ignoring the majority of nouns in the language, which have only grammatical gender marking. Thus, it is possible to distinguish two notions of gender: (i) referential, in which the attribution of gender is determined by its sexual referent; (ii) purely morphological, in which there is grammatical information, but not referential. Previous studies have shown that the morphological notion can be investigated by various elements, such as endings, historical origins and hypernyms. The objective of this work is to expand the study of the motivators of morphological gender, and investigate the observations of different authors, both linguists and grammarians, on another possible influencer of gender: the word formation processes. The analysis consists of investigating the processes identified by linguists and how gender manifests itself in the examples that they present. This paper also examines the considerations of grammarians regarding morphological gender and contrasts them with what the linguists explain about the processes studied. The results show that seven out of the eight processes analyzed present a regularity regarding the attribution of morphological gender. Among them, suffixation, portmanteau, composition and truncation stand out. In the first two processes mentioned, it is notable that the ending influences the morphological gender: in the case of suffixation, the nominal suffix carries gender information; in portmanteau, both the gender and the ending of the second word are maintained. In subordinate compositions, the first element determines the gender. In truncation, even though the ending of the lexical item is deleted, the gender of the original item is maintained, regardless of its new ending. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the word forming processes as an influencer of gender in the Portuguese language and its relationship with other motivators, such as the ending.