First notes on prefixation in Colonial Brazilian Portuguese from the 16th and 17th centuries

In the field of Portuguese historical morphology, works that focus on prefixal formatives is scarce, with those specific to suffixation being much more numerous. The study here synthesised, following those already conducted on prefixation in Old Portuguese (Lopes, 2021a, 2018, 2013), focuses on this morpholexical process in Colonial Brazilian Portuguese (Cardoso, Andrade; Carneiro, 2023), covering a period spanning from the 16th century to the first two decades of the 19th century. The investigation is part of a larger collective project, focused on the historical constitution of Colonial Brazilian Portuguese (PBC), being developed by the team of one of the most prominent research groups in Historical Linguistics within the Lusophone world, the Programa para a História da Língua Portuguesa (PROHPOR). We will discuss, as our focus in this article, the prefixal formations generated in the 16th and 17th centuries. Having as an empirical basis an initial and representative sample of data, extracted from fourteen philologically edited manuscripts from the period, and relying on the principles of descriptive morphology (Rio-Torto et al., 2016; Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2009; Mattos e Silva, 2008; Bosque; Demonte, 1999) and historical morphology (Rio-Torto, 1998; Viaro, 2009, 2010, 2014; Martín García; Varela, 2012; Lopes, 2021b), our goal is to offer a description of how prefixation functioned in the generation of words in the Portuguese language of the two centuries considered, and to outline a semantic-morpholexical-functional characterization of this lexicogenic mechanism, its formatives, and the resulting lexical units

Colonial period · Colonialism · Constitution · Portuguese · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History of Colonial Brazil · Linguistics and Language Studies