Lexical expansion: access to English loan-words with Portuguese morphology

Abstract

Lexical Expansion is a recurring theme in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. As far as we know, the present study is the first attempt to pursuit the subject through an experimental approach. In the present paper, we report the results of a lexical decision test based on loan words from English that accept affixes from Brazilian Portuguese (eg. clipagem, cropar). A CRT regression tree indicates that participants recognize these words better than pseudowords. However, their responses are slower and cannot be compared to responses for English or for Brazilian Portuguese words.

Keywords

• expansão lexical, decisão lexical, processamento de palavras, empréstimos lexicais.