Investigating the morphosyntactic structure of des-x-ar formations in Brazilian Portuguese: focusing on the parasynthesis phenomenon

Abstract

This work revisits parasynthetic formations in des-X-ar in Brazilian Portuguese under a syntactic perspective (HALLE; MARANTZ, 1993). Parasynthesis is characterized by the simultaneous attaching of a suffix and a prefix to a base, and the absence of any of these elements renders the formation ungrammatical (SAID ALI, 1966; CAMARA JR., 1975; KEHDI, 2005; BASILIO, 2009). This is an interesting process, as it seems to challenge the binary branching hypothesis. Descriptively, we propose three patterns for the formations in des-X-ar: non-parasynthetic verbs, partially parasynthetic verbs and totally parasynthetic verbs. In the implementation of the proposal we developed a strictly binary syntactic structure, in which the prefix des- may appear in two different structural positions. One of them includes attaching the prefix directly to the root, which has as a consequence the fact that the prefix itself integrates the verbalization process, entering the structure before the categorizer. Such a structure explains the pattern in which the absence of the prefix correlates to ungrammaticality. In these structures, the prefix projects its label into the syntactic structure. The second position, in turn, is structurally higher than the categorizing head and it explains the patterns in which the absence of the prefix does no correlate to ungrammatically. In these cases, the prefix is considered to be an adjunct, since it does not change the formal properties of the structure. Finally, in both structures, we propose that the internal argument is inserted through the verbal categorizer.