A produção de formas verbais irregulares por crianças falantes do Português Brasileiro

Abstract

This study investigated the acquisition of irregular verbs in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) when conjugated in the Present of Indicative, Present of Subjunctive and Simple Past tenses by native-BP speaking children, with the aim of describing and analyzing the interaction between Morphology and Phonology in the light of the Lexical Theory. The focuses of the study were consonant alternations shown in the conjugation of certain irregular verbs, such as the verb “medir”, whose forms meço, meça and medi, for example, have the alternation [s] ~ [d]. Such forms, in the process of acquisition of BP morphophonology, tend to be employed without the consonant alternation, according to the regular conjugation of verbs, and can manifest as me[d]o and me[d]a, in place of me[s]o and me[s]a. For the investigation of this fact of the language, the study had a sample of sixteen informants, eight female and eight male, literate, between 06 and 09 years old. The corpus under study wasobtained through the application of two different instruments created for this research, which elicitated the employment of ten irregular verbs (dizer, fazer, satisfazer, trazer, poder, ter, perder, medir, ouvir e pedir) in the 1st and 2nd person singular of the verb tenses under investigation. Results were described according to the controlled variables in the study and were submitted to an analysis in the light of the Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM) assumptions, following Lee (1995). The data show that the native-BP speaking children up to 09 years old can still manifest regularized verbal inflections without any consonant alternation, evidencing the late domain of the morphophonological relationships that are required by the irregular verb conjugation in the developmental process of the language. The study assigns this result to the complexity that irregular facts of language entail to acquisition, since they imply the division of the lexical component of the language in levels, in addition to the interaction between morphological and phonological phenomena.