Diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese: suffixation or infixation?

Abstract

Here we entertain the possibility of analyzing the diminutive morpheme ‘inh’ of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as an infix, rather than as a suffix. Therefore, we argue against the tradition of (descriptive and analytical) morphological studies in BP. We show that, surprisingly, our unorthodox hypothesis not only accounts for the run-of-the-mill data more naturally than
the competing analyses, but also accounts for some non trivial additional data that has been ignored so far.