Underlying representation of [w]-final words in Brazilian Portuguese: Evidence from morphological derivation

Abstract

This paper deals with the underlying representation of [w]-final words in Brazilian Portuguese, usually spelled with and pronounced as [w] and occasionally as [ɫ] (e.g., papel / [paˈpɛw] ~ [paˈpɛɫ] ‘paper’). It focuses on non-verbs derived by a vowel-initial suffix preceded by [l] (e.g., papel+eiro ‘paper+suffix’ / [papeˈlejɾʊ] ‘papermaker’; cliente+ismo ‘client+suffix’ / [kliẽnteˈlizmʊ] ‘patronage’). The results from a pseudoword task answered by 219 participants contrasted to lexicon data from Corpus Brasileiro show that native speakers associate such derived forms with bases already containing [l] in the last syllable, either in the onset or the coda position. This observation is interpreted in a constraint-based approach, with the assumption that a demand for alignment between vowel-initial suffixes and roots closed by /l/, along with the requirement for phonological correspondence between base and derivative, is highly ranked in a grammar that accounts for learning morphophonological representations in the language.