ABSTRACT
The semantic status of the Portuguese prefix des- has been a much discussed topic in recent literature. In this paper, we revisit the data from Bona (2014)DE BONA, Camila. 2014. Os prefixos de negação des- e in- no PB: Considerações morfossemânticas. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras), Instituto de Letras, UFRGS, Porto Alegre. with the objective of verifying the hypothesis that the prefix des- has come to denote only the reversal of a trajectory of change (productively applying to verbs of change or to deverbal nouns), no longer being configured as a negation of state prefix. For analysis purposes, as a theoretical framework, we chose the semantic model from Lieber (2004)LIEBER, Rochelle. 2004. Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., which presents a set of semantic features to the description of affixes, such as [-Loc] for denials and [+ IELTS] for paths. Furthermore, a diachronic research on the date of entry of these lexical items in Portuguese was done, as well as a comparison with neological items to evaluate the productivity of prefix des- in current Brazilian Portuguese.
Keywords:
Prefix des-; Lexical semantics; Reversion; Negation
