Morphological truncation versus hypocorism: two different word-formation processes?

DOIS PROCESSOS DE FORMAÇÃO DE PALAVRAS DIFERENTES?

Abstract

This paper investigates two word-formation operations: hypocorism and morphological truncation. To do this, there is a review of the morphophonological literature about this topic with focus on the differences and similarities between them; the conclusion is that these operations have a highly varied behavior which complicates the possibility of postulating a general formation pattern. Moreover, empirically, the comparison between data from two corpora shows that: a) hypocoristics and truncated forms are different from each other in terms of the possible values for syllabic structure, anchoring pattern and presence of an additional truncation suffix; b) hypocoristics and truncated forms resemble each other by the fact that their formal behavior cannot be determined by any characteristic of their source-words. To finish, this article outlines an initial unified analysis for them based on the phonologically-enriched version of the Distributed Morphology model (Haugen, 2011) which considers that truncation is a possible exponent for an evaluative morpheme already present in the syntactic structure which conveys the appreciative reading. Syllabic information, anchoring information and information regarding the presence of an additional suffix are codified on the Vocabulary Items either in the exponents themselves or in diacritics marked in the exponent.