Antónia Estrela, Amália Mendes, Rita Veloso, Fernanda Bacelar do Nascimento, Luísa Pereira

New words, old suffixes: Nominal derivation in the African varieties of Portuguese compared to European Portuguese

The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the nominal suffixation patterns found in the African varieties of Portuguese, under a contrastive study with the European Portuguese norm. Our study is based on data from the Corpus Africa – which includes subcorpora of the five African Varieties of Portuguese (AVP) (Bacelar do Nascimento, 2006) –, contrasted with the lexicon extracted from the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese (Généreux et al, 2012), as well as lexicographic works of reference.
The Corpus Africa has around 640.000 words for each variety, including spoken and written texts, and the five corpora are comparable in size, chronology and broad types and genres. Five lexicons have been extracted from the corpora, comprising lexical items from the main categories: Common Noun, Adjective and Verb. These lexicons have been compared and treated statistically in the form of contrastive lists that provide information on the set of lemmas that constitute the common core vocabulary of the five subcorpora, but also on the set of those that only occurred in one or in some of the subcorpora. The vocabulary common to all the subcorpora corresponds to 91.75% of occurrences in the corpus. The lemmas that occurred in just one of the corpora are not very frequent but provide important clues into the lexical change undergone by different varieties of Portuguese.
Each subcorpus shows innovation in nominal suffixation (compared to the European norm) and these innovations occur in one, at most two or three AVP. These new words can be divided in two types: (i) words that have no equivalent with the same lexical basis in EP and (ii) words that have a lexical equivalent in EP, but use a different suffix in its formation. Some examples are presented below:

(i) positivação (Angola)
   amealhação (Cape Verde)
   bancarização (Angola and Cape Verde)

(ii) desalfandegação (Cape Verde)/ desalfandegamento (EP)
       confinação (Guinea Bissau)/ confinidade (EP)
       passassão (Guinea Bissau)/ passagem (EP)

Taking into account a thorough analysis of all the examples available in the Corpus Africa, we will clarify the role that suffixation plays in the formation of new nouns in AVP, regarding the morphological and semantic properties of the basis selected by suffixes with equivalent meaning. The AVP are frequently spoken as a second language in the Portuguese speaking countries of Africa and this is frequently pointed as one of the aspects that account for the diverging phenomena encountered in these varieties. To test this hypothesis, we will further compare our data with errors in noun formation in COPLE2, a learner corpus of Portuguese.

References

Génereux, Michel, Iris Hendrickx, Amália Mendes (2012) “Introducing the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese On-Line”. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation – LREC 2012, Istanbul, May 21-27, 2012, pp. 2237-2244.

Bacelar do Nascimento, Maria Fernanda, José Bettencourt Gonçalves, Luísa Alice Santos Pereira, Antónia Estrela (2006) “The African Varieties of Portuguese: Compiling Comparable Corpora and Analyzing Data-derived Lexicon”, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), May 24-26, Genoa, Italy.