New words, old suffixes: Nominal derivation in the African varieties of Portuguese compared to European Portuguese

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the nominal suffixation patterns found in the African varieties of Portuguese, under a contrastive study with the European Portuguese norm. Our study is based on data from the Corpus Africa, contrasted with the lexicon extracted from the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese, as well as lexicographic works of reference. Each subcorpus shows innovation in nominal suffixation (compared to the European norm) and these innovations occur in one, at most two or three AVP. These new words can be divided in two types: (i) words that have no equivalent with the same lexical basis in EP and (ii) words that have a lexical equivalent in EP, but use a different suffix in its formation. We will clarify the role that suffixation plays in the formation of new nouns in AVP, regarding the morphological and semantic properties of the basis selected by suffixes with equivalent meaning.