Description and morphosyntactic analysis of the terminology of babassu from Maranhão

Abstract

This article aims to describe and analyze the morphological aspects of the terminology of babassu based on derivational morphology and a typological proposal by Alves (2004). It is divided in four parts: (i) survey on terms and its variants in the terminology of babassu from oral language in the state of Maranhão; (ii) selection of the corpus with the aid of language processing programs; (iii) description of syntactical processes registered on the corpus, and (iv) analysis of the selected terms. The corpus of this research is based on the oral discourse of coconut breakers from the municipalities of Buriti, ItapecuruMirim, Viana, Vargem Grande, Presidente Vargas, Cantanhede, and São Benedito, in the state of Maranhão. To gather these terms, we applied a lexical-semantic questionnaire developed by the project Atlas Linguístico do Maranhão (ALiMA) (Linguistic Atlas of Maranhão), which contains 54 questions. For the selection and compilation of data, we used the software AntConc – which transcribes and processes the surveys – and Microsoft Access – which generates tables to organize the registered terms. The results show that, in the corpus used for this work, phrasal compounds represent the more productive formation process, corresponding to 71% of 94 selected terms.