Phonological aspects of variation in plural diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This study investigated the formation of diminutives of plural nouns in BP that feature the vowel <e> immediately to the left of the number morpheme, considering the existence of at least two possible strategies: attaching the suffix directly to the root (e.g. florzinhas) or to the end of the word (e.g. florezinhas). The hypotheses tested experimentally to explain the phenomenon were i) the existence of a contrast between bases in which the vowel <e> appears both in the singular and plural forms (e.g. elefantes), and bases where it appears only in the plural (e.g. flores), and ii) the preference for diminutives with an even number of syllables due to the binary rhythm of Portuguese. Mixed-effects statistical models indicated a preference for attaching the diminutive to the end of the word for bases of the first type, while the number of syllables was not correlated with the results.