GMHP Grupo de Morfologia Histórica do Português
versão em português Coordination: Prof. Dr. Mário Eduardo Viaro
Related Areas
Obviously the most dialogue of Historical Morphology is engaged with the synchronic models of Morphology. Approximations between Morphology and Phonology, on the one hand, and Morphology and Syntax, on the other, have created a rather vast and heterogeneous bibliography in terms of solutions. Morphology had its apex in the 19th century and was resumed in the 80’s, when it was initially resumed by Structuralism and then by Generativism. Great names haven given very big contributions to the development of this field of knowledge, even before the diachronic studies were resumed.
The correlations between Historical Morphology and Romance Philology are rather evident, once the suffixes are rarely autochthonous and usually share forms and similar meanings with other Romance languages, especially the other Ibero-Romance (Galician, Mirandese, Asturian, Guadramilese, Riodonorese, Spanish, Catalan, Valencian and its dialects). Thus, a suffix may share the same origin with one or more Romance languages, in the same way a word with a given suffix may migrate from one language to another due to the phenomenon of borrowing. The mapping of such speeches is the task of the Linguistic Geography, the contact between the cultures is studied by the History of Languages, the existence of extinct speeches is recovered by the studies of Philology.
More specifically, the variation of Portuguese is a phenomenon the lacks research. The variation in territories outside Brazil (Portugal and former colonies) and the internal Brazilian variation are of foremost importance for the dating of phenomena, including the ones related to the Historical Morphology. The drastic variation also has a great value, once the phenomena coming from slang and other special speeches end up being part of the common lexicon, usually with a rather obscure etymon. Despite the profusion of data, there is little systematization of what has already been done. Especially the variation in Portugal can be a factor to detect so-called Brazilianisms or question etymologies. Prof. Dr. Mário Eduardo Viaro - besides GHMP, also coordinates FDPB - Formação da Diversidade do Português Brasileiro (the Formation of the Diversity of Brazilian Portuguese) - is specifically concerned with such issues.
Even more specifically, the unusual employment of formative elements in the Saussurean parole, though of little importance for the lexicon as a whole, brings to its core truths related to its communicative efficiency, an essential element in the stylistic studies. Thus, the minimum frequency is made up for the so-called expressivity of the word, which is only reached when the intuitive rules of its functioning are valid, which are the same rules that the GHMP aims to detect. Thus, the stylistic study combined with the historical study shows itself, most of the time, very important to set apart what is common and what is specific from the author analyzed in past synchronies. The scholarship student Juliana Bianchi Leone dedicates herself to this study, who studies characteristic elements in the speech of Juó Bananére, with a view to dating of words in the 20th century and to the dating of phonetic phenomena.
The Historiography of Linguistics is one of the elements to enable an understanding of the models and their historical context, correlated to the ideas and their authors. Its study also prevents failures in the authorship attribution as well as a duplication of studies. The GHMP has been researching articles and books that deal with issues related to historical morphology and suffixes in order to establish a bibliography that is coherently directed to the advances of these studies. Recently we have finished researching the following journals: Romania, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, Sachen und Wörter e Archivio Glottologico Italiano.
In our presupposition, when we talked about the triple meaning words we drew the attention that the GHMP is concerned exclusively with the non-radical elements of formation and with grammatical morphemes. But it is undeniable the contribution given by other researches, in which the word as a whole is involved in issues especially of productivity and neologism. The dialogue with such studies is permanent. Lexicological studies, especially the ones that involve diachronic issues are also essential to the establishment of past synchronies. The etymological study depends on an exact correlation between the results of the Historical Morphology and Lexicology. Many suffixes have a direct link with even more specific issues, that of the Toponomy, in such a way that this study is also very close to what the GHMP has been developing.
Semantics is still an area that holds many interests. Besides General Semantics, there are innumerous other studies that are of immediate interest to the creation of good models in Historical Morphology. General Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics and Cognition Studies are held in a relation of universals and in the matter of perception, which can explain innumerous parallels found in semantic derivations of different suffixes. The studies about Language Acquisition are directly linked to such results. Not only can acquisition of meanings and sounds settle crucial issues but also elements without meaning (interfixes and thematic vowels).
All the conclusions, reconstructions and models devised by the GMPH come directly from the analysis of different types of corpora, in such a way that the recent studies of corpus linguistics are of foremost importance to enable an assessment of rigor and of the technique employed while handling these data. The frequency of use is a very important datum. For this study, the group also makes use of basic concepts of Statistics and a massive search performed by the Google search engine (pages restricted to Portuguese), on August 15, 2006, in a universe of 500 million pages.
Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
Grupo de Morfologia Histórica do Português