As classes formais do português brasileiro

Abstract

In the line of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993, 1994; Harris 1999), this paper proposes to describe and analyze groups of Portuguese non derived words ended in non stressed vowels /o, a, e/ or phonological “zero” that constitute form-classes (or declational classes). In this language there are four form-classes. The results permite to recognize the vowels /o/ and /a/ as creators of non-marked form-classes. The vowel /e/ has two different status, it can be either thematic vowel or epenthetic vowel.