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This paper describes the emergence of prefixes a-, eN- and deS- in the production of Brazilian Portuguese speaking children focusing on the production of analyzable forms from: comparison of the occurrence of non-prefixed and prefixed forms with common roots; analysis of form frequency in adult speech (input); production of innovative forms. The corpus under analysis contains 160 recording sessions of spontaneous productions by three children between three and five years old. The results show that, among the forms prefixed with semantic compositionality, 53% have a previous presence of the form without the prefix; that is, they are possibly analyzable; the emergence of analyzable prefix forms increases with age (p. value = .030), and the most analytical and innovative prefix is deS-. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the inversion of the relation of possession in constructions of the type "Sou seu x" ('I am your x')", in which x is replaced by a social function of kinship or proximity through an interface between morphosyntax and discourse analysis. Data under investigation were collected from a specific methodology on a web search site aiming at observing the occurrence of six constructions in context of usage (i) "Sou seu marido" ('I am your husband'); (ii) "Sou sua mulher" ('I am your wife'); (iii) "Sou seu pai" ('I am your father'); (iv) "Sou sua mãe" ('I am your mother'); (v) "Sou seu amigo" ('I am your (male) friend'; (vi) 'Sou sua amiga' ('I am your (female) friend'). In this type of construction, the interpretation of possession, not rarely, the interpretation of possession functions inversely. In fact, the nominal term possessed, at the morphosyntactic level, becomes a possessor term at the discourse level, especially in authoritarian utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the empirical properties of morphologically complex verbs of change in Brazilian Portuguese. Its main goal is to find out whether there are (not) correlations between prefix morphophonological form, root semantics and verb argument structure. All verbs analyzed denote events in which the internal argument is the undergoer of a change, and a classification in four semantic subclasses according to their root meaning is proposed: state, place, transfer of possession (either abstract or concrete) and reconfiguration. Contrary to what previous literature has suggested, finegrained investigation within each of these classes has shown that it is not possible to exclusively associate morphological forms to specific root semantics or morphosyntactic behavior, although it is possible to observe general tendencies. To provide an analysis to account for the robust homogenous structural properties and general semantics behavior across the class, in face of the morphological variation in what regards prefix choice among the forms a-, en- and es-, it is proposed that prefixes are the phonological realizations of a functional head in the lower domain of the verb (labeled R, Relational) whose choice is given in terms of contextual allomorphy. It is shown that vocabulary insertion at R is guided by locality with the root. The theory of allomorphy proposed in Embick (2010), which is based on locality and linearity, was efficient in accounting for the selection of allomorphs of R, v and Th (Theme Vowel) heads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]