A descriptive study of the Brazilian neologisms sextou, trintou, and other morphosemantically similar words

Abstract

Treball de fi de màster en Lingüística Teòrica i Aplicada. Directora: Dra. Louise McNally

This thesis presents a description of the main linguistic features of some neologisms used in informal contexts in Brazilian Portuguese: sextou (derived from sexta-feira, ‘Friday’), trintou (derived from trinta, ‘thirty’) and other morphosemantically similar words. They are identical in form to a past tense verb in 2nd and 3rd person singular but are not pragmatically used in agreement with this tense, person or number -- a corpus study was carried out to show that. Their morphological creation process is argued to be derivation, and they convey not only the meaning of their base noun, but also the emotional feeling speakers get from it – e.g., the joy of being on a Friday and having the weekend ahead to rest. This meaning is accounted for by appealing to context and common ground between speakers and hearers. The proposed account is contrasted with the one existing account in the literature.