Word formation patterns in Brazilian Sign Language
This paper is part of a major project that aims at investigating word formation strategies
in Brazilian Sign Language (LSB), and search for a definition of what is a morpheme in this
language. Since there are few papers about morphology in LSB, as Brito (1995), Quadros &
Karnopp (2004), Felipe (1998 and 2006), and Rodero-Takahira (2012), we have also appealed
for papers about morphology in American Sign Language (ASL), as Stokoe (1960) and Aronoff,
Meir & Sandler (2005). We investigate some criteria proposed by Felipe (1998, 2006) that takes
as morphemes: i) a root or a stem, considering Movement; ii) an affix, considering alternations
between Movement and Handshape; or, iii) a desinence, as direction – considering numberperson agreement, or Handshape – considering gender. We wonder if the parameter Movement, a
phoneme as is explained in literature about sign languages, can really be considered a root in all
kinds of signs, even in the ones that are signed only by Facial Expressions, as LADRÃO
(“thief”).
The specific objective of this paper is to explore compounding, a strategy often used in
word formation, studying its morphosyntactic behavior, besides defining general patterns in
word formation in LSB. For this, we have based our assumptions in the proposals present in
Lidell & Johnson (1986) and Meir et al. (2010), about ASL; and Figueiredo Silva & Sell (2009),
in LSB, who make the following description of the kind of compounds, as we can see in the
examples below:
(1) “Apparent” compounds – no fix order
a. HOMEM^CRIANÇA / MULHER^CRIANÇA [menino / menina]
MAN^CHILD / WOMAN^CHILD [boy / girl]
b. BEBÊ^HOMEM / BEBÊ^MULHER [bebê – menino ou menina]
BABY^MAN / BABY^WOMAN [baby - boy or girl]
(2) A possible kind of composition for agglutination
a. MAÇÃ^DIVERSO [frutas]
APPLE^SEVERAL [fruits]
b. LEÃO^DIVERSO [animais]
LION^SEVERAL [animals]
c. ROUPA^DIVERSO [vestuário]
CLOTHES^SEVERAL [costume]
(3) “True” compounds – fix order
a. HOMEM^RURAL [agricultor]
b. CASA^ESTUDO [escola]
c. CASA^CRUZ [igreja]
MAN^RURAL [agriculturist]
HOUSE^STUDY [school]
HOUSE^CROSS [church]
(4) “Phrasal” compounds
a. HOMEM^CONSERTO^ELETRICIDADE [eletricista]
MAN^FIX^ ELECTRICITY [electrician]
b. CASA^VENDA^PAPEL [papelaria]
HOUSE^SELL^PAPER [stationery]
We are considering both non-simultaneous compounds as CASA^ESTUDAR (escola) /
HOUSE^TO-STUDY (school) and the possibility of forming simultaneous compounds as
SEXO^VIAJAR (lua-de-mel) / SEX^TO-TRAVEL (honeymoon). Taking examples as the ones
shown in Figueiredo Silva & Sell (2009) above and others collected by recorded data and by
interviews with native signers of LSB, mainly in the variation used in São Paulo City, we raised
some hypothesis: (i) there are two kinds of roots in LSB, one in which the feature of movement
is incorporated and other in which the feature of movement is not incorporated; and (ii) the
feature [+movement] can be considered a categorizing morpheme, when it is not incorporated
into the root to form its meaning, in a way that this hypothesis follows from the first. We aim at
answering two questions: 1-What kinds of compounds does LSB admit?; and, 2-What is the
category of words formed in LSB?
Starting by question 2, we investigated which are the categories of words in LSB, and
which are the categories of words formed by compounding. This aspect has already been studied
a lot in ASL, by Frishberg (1975), Supalla & Newport (1978), and Meir et al. (2007, 2009).
Some studies show that words in LSB don’t have a defined category, as Quadros & Karnopp
(2004), Felipe (2006), and Leite (2008) verified. In this way, one single sign may be used as a
noun or as a verb, as we can see in (5):
(5) a. CASA / MORAR
b. VIDA / VIVER
c. TELEFONE / TELEFONAR
d. CADEIRA / SENTAR
HOUSE / TO LIVE
LIFE / TO LIVE
TELEPHONE / TO CALL
CHAIR / TO SIT
This paper follows Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle & Marantz, 1993; Marantz,
1997) and papers about compounds within this theory, as Minussi (2009). This theory assumes
that both words and sentences are formed during the syntactic derivation, in this way, there is no
lexicon that previously forms words. Instead, DM predicts that there is a list with primitive
elements that contains acategorial roots and abstract morphemes. For this reason, this theory may
bring a new point of view about the content of words in LSB and helps us to define the category
of words, as well as to investigate the hypothesis that what is behind the formation of compounds
in LSB seems to involve an analysis of the roots that form the compounds as the ones presented.
As results for this research, we examined the kinds of productive compounds and
identified some properties present in the compounds of LSB, as the reduction or lack of the
feature of movement in most part of compounds, suggesting that compounds in LSB are not
formed from verbs, but from categorical neutral roots and classifiers.
Keywords: Word formation; Brazilian Sign Language; Compounding; Distributed Morphology.
Bibliographical References:
BRITO, Lucinda Ferreira. 1995. Por uma gramática de línguas de sinais. Tempo brasileiro, RJ, 2ª
ed., 2010.
FELIPE, Tanya Amara. 2006. Os processos de formação de palavras na LIBRAS. ETD –
Educação Temática Digital, Campinas, v.7, n.2, p.200-217, jun. 2006.
FIGUEIREDO-SILVA, Maria Cristina; SELL, Fabíola Ferreira Sucupira. 2009. Algumas notas
sobre os compostos em português brasileiro e em LIBRAS. Artigo disponibilizado por e-mail.
MEIR, Irit; ARONOFF, Mark; SANDLER, Wendy & PADDEN, Carol (2010). Sign languages
and compounding. In SCALISE, S. & VOGEL, I. (Eds.). Compounding. John Benjamins, p. 301322.