Prosody and morphology

Abstract

This text describes the lower units of the prosodic hierarchy (syllables, moraes and feet) to illustrate how these constituents are used by a branch of Morphology called Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy & Prince, 1986 et seq.). It seeks to present the theoretical principles of this type of approach, as well as the advantages of incorporating aspects of the prosodic structure into the morphological description. This paper focuses mainly on a variety of ways in which morphological systems can use this type of phonological structure and it shows the relevance of syllables, moraes and feet in the description of inflexion and word formation processes in natural languages. Finally, it shows that some Portuguese phenomena, such as clipping ('biju' for „bijuteria‟, “imitation jewelry”; „refri‟ for „refrigerante, “soft drink”) and reduplication ('chororô', “excessive crying”) can be satisfactorily described by this model. The idea of the paper is to show that the prosodymorphology "partnership" worked well, managing to solve a series of problems that had hitherto been unanswered or badly solved in morphological literature.