Innovative participles in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper we analyze a new kind of participle formation in Brazilian Portuguese, which we have called innovative participles. This type of participle, which is getting more and more common for speakers of this language, takes place in contexts where only the canonical regular forms were expected, freely alternating with such forms. Our main aims are to determine the structure associated with innovative participles and to understand what mechanism of Brazilian Portuguese grammar makes the variation between regular and innovative participles possible. Assuming a Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993) approach to grammar, we propose that the same syntactic structure underlies the formation of both types of participles and the difference between them is the result of different morphological processes that occur at the level of Morphological Structure.