NÃO em formações nominais no português: morfologização versus gramaticalização

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the word NÃO (non/not) prepended to names in Portuguese. Would the word NÃO be a prefix? Or would this word be a member of a compound? To answer these questions, we consider the assumptions of Lexical Morphology and Phonology (KIPARSKY, 1982) and propose another question: would formations with the word NÃO (não + nominal) be located on a morphological level or post-lexicallevel (syntactic component)? Silva & Mioto (2009) propose that formations like não + nominal would be syntactically transparent; that is, this type of formation accepts negative agreement and, therefore, the word NÃO could not be a prefix or a member of a compound, since these formations would act at the post-lexical level. We collected data on the Corpus do Português website by Davies & Ferreira (2006-), and formed a corpus with data from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. We found thatformations with the word NÃO were more productive in the twentieth century, and the cases of NÃO + noun were increase in this century. We conducted tests involving the formations with the word NÃO and negative agreement, and these tests showed us that the structures with participle are more transparent, and certain structures with noun are more opaque. After that, we collected at the Google database formations like não + noun and observed that the type of nominalization interfere with the use ofnegative agreement. Thus, we detected two types of structure: one is more opaque, located on the morphological level, where the word NÃO constitute a compositional prefix (SCHWINDT, 2000), and another that is more transparent and it would be at the post-lexical level. We understand that more opaque formations can be considered a process of morphologization that does not imply in grammaticalization. We realized also the structure NÃO OBSTANTE (although) separately, considering the hypothesis that such a construction would have gone through a process of grammaticalization in Portuguese, like Hopper and Traugott (1993). In the analysis of NÃO OBSTANTE in different periods of time, we found evidence of grammticalization stages of the construction NÃO OBSTANTE, initially formed by a negation particle plus the present participle of the verb OBSTAR, and then re-analyzed as concessiveconjunctive expression, selecting only verbs in the subjunctive. We used the theoretical assumptions of the Theory of Variation and Change (LABOV, 1972) forthe analysis of competition between NÃO OBSTANTE in more grammatical function and the item EMBORA performing the same function. It was observed that the variation between these structures interfered with the process of grammaticalization of NÃO OBSTANTE. We conclude by considering several times that there are two processesacting in formations like não + nominal in Portuguese.