A palavra mínima em português brasileiro: contribuições para uma discussão em aberto

Hayes (1995) mentions a “minimal word syndrome,” according to which, in certain languages, words cannot be smaller than a size defined by the prosodic configuration of such languages. In the literature, the minimal word is usually associated with the requirement that a word have at least two moras, and this requirement can be minimally satisfied by a disyllabic word only, in languages ​​that are insensitive to weight, or also by a monosyllabic word with a long vowel (in languages ​​in which such a vowel has a distinctive character) or with a coda, in languages ​​that show sensitivity to syllabic weight. For McCarthy and Prince (1995), the minimal word is the result of the prosodic hierarchy and the foot binarity condition. In Portuguese, unlike what occurs in other languages, such as English, there is discussion about the action of the minimal word requirement. In the literature, it is possible to find arguments for and against its relevance to the prosodic configuration of Portuguese. It is in this scenario that the present work seeks to contribute to this discussion based on the analysis of arguments for and against a minimum bimoraicity imposed on words in Brazilian Portuguese. Bisol (2000) and Vigário (2003), for Brazilian and European Portuguese, respectively, argue that the bimoraic minimal word has no role, since there are monosyllabic words without a coda. Booij (2004), in turn, emphasizes that these words are rare, so that this argument is not valid for the author. Still regarding the arguments of Bisol (2000) and Vigário (2003), according to the authors, there are no phonological processes that are applied for a bimoraic word to emerge and, also, there are no phonological processes that are not applied for a non-bimoraic word to emerge. The literature on Brazilian Portuguese, however, shows that hypocorization can be understood as a phenomenon from which bimoraic words become superficial (Gonçalves, 2004a, among others), and the analysis of variable phenomena reveals that some of them have their application restrained if it results in a monomoraic word. It is worth mentioning that, even among authors who defend the imposition of a minimum length for words in Portuguese, there is no consensus as to how this length is configured, with proposals that take into account structures such as the syllable, the foot or even the number of segments. Thus, there is a need for studies that are methodologically oriented towards a search for evidence against or in favor of the application of the minimal word in Portuguese.