Grammatical gender assignment by Portuguese non-native language learners in suffixed words

• Autor(a) principal: Rio-Torto, Graça
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Ferreira, Tânia
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Confluência
• Texto Completo: https://revistaconfluencia.org.br/rc/article/view/540
• topic: Género gramatical; Aquisição lexical; Sufixação; Derivação; Português como língua não materna; Grammatical gender; Lexical acquisition; Suffixation; Derivation; Portuguese as a non-native language

This study aims to investigate to what extent the grammatical gender assignment of suffixed nouns by learners of European Portuguese as a non-native language (PNNL) varies according to the suffix and, more specifically, its formal class and the gender’s marker associated to them. The empirical basis of this study was drawn from a survey, in which late learners, native speakers of Chinese, who attend classes of different levels of learning (from B1 to C1), were asked to explicit the nominal gender value of suffixed nouns in -ção, -s[z]ão, -ão, -agem, -idade and -ice. Identical patterns were found at all levels of learning, but there is a notable incidence of deviations in suffixed forms in -ão and -ice. These results show that the assignment of nouns to genders depends on the degree of representativeness and opacity of the suffix in the input and its associated gender value.