Borrowed Compounds, Borrowed Compounding – Portuguese Data

Abstract

Morphological compounding patterns in Portuguese are quite recent. This innovation was triggered by a particular case of language contact, which yielded a peculiar kind of borrowing, both lexical (neoclassical roots) and structural (neoclassical compounding). The introduction of this ‘innovative’ word formation resource may have found a smooth path into Portuguese through the similarity with prefixation, but the key to success was that the same kind of language contact probably took place simultaneously in many European languages. In the case of Portuguese, French (particularly during the 1700s and 1800s) and English (more recently) were the main source languages. The sudden abundance of data that produced a parallel neoclassical lexicon may have increased the pressure that favoured the emergence of root compounding in Portuguese. Beyond the language-specific situation, this case is also relevant for the reassessment of a general theory of borrowing and borrowing typologies (such as Thomason and Kaufman 1988), since it involves pairs of languages (like Ancient Greek and Portuguese) that were never in direct contact, because they existed in different synchronies, and belong to two different branches of the Indo-European family.