Rumos e ritmos da mudança linguística: alternância vocálica e flexão de número em português

• Main Author: Isabel Almeida Santos
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela 2015-01-01
• Series: Estudos de Linguistica Galega
• Online Access: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=305641135009

The Portuguese language has an inflectional mechanism to distinguish between singular and plural forms of nouns and adjectives, but in some cases an [o]/ [ɔ] alternation also participates in the establishment of number oppositions. This article looks at some descriptive issues concerning the mechanism and relates the syncrhonic phenomenon to its diachronic background. Thus we will i) analyze the phonological phenomenon underlying the alternation in question, ii) examine its morpholexical dimension, and iii) look at some historical aspects that lend empirical support to our synchronic analyses. While a historical assimilation process initially gave rise to the mechanism described, as a result of subsequent analogical change its functioning increased in complexity and as a consequence, further change in various directions ensued. Due to the unsystematic nature of analogy and the lexical idiosyncrasy of the [o]/[ɔ] alternation, usage was subject to hesitations and variation. Prescriptive codifications do not always reflect this reality, and consequently often conceal the true complexity of language use.