The Identification of the Compositionality of Derived Words: A Study with Brazilian Portuguese Speakers on the Suffixes -ção, -dor, and -mento

Abstract

This study aims to verify the recognition of compositionality in certain complex words formed by suffixation among contemporary Brazilian Portuguese speakers through experimental tests applied to university students from the Computer Science, Law, Economics, and Journalism programs at the State University of Southwest Bahia. These tests sought to examine the morphological and semantic associations made by these speakers when presented with words formed by the suffixes -ção, -dor, and -mento, including semantically ambiguous words (such as inflação [inflation], amador [amateur], and temperamento [temperament]) and transparent words (such as educação [education], vendedor [seller], and salvamento [rescue]), as well as distractors (simple words (like coração [heart], Equador [Equator] and cimento [cement]) and pseudowords (like *coflação, *alvedor and *lumimento) created specifically for this research). This investigation was conducted based on the principles of Generative Theory (Chomsky, 1957; 1986; 1995) and also relies on the proposals of Villalva (2003, 2007) and Villalva and Silvestre (2014). The results obtained here indicated that semantically transparent derived words provided participants with the highest recognition of compositionality, meaning that they more easily retrieved the relationship between the complex word and its base, demonstrating that the retrieval of a word’s compositionality is facilitated when it shares common morphological and semantic traits with its component parts.