Mãenarquia, Demãecracia?

Lexical creativity in spontaneous speech of children

Abstract

The research presented in this article aimed to analyze how the process of forming new words, neologisms, occurs in children’s spontaneous speech. The analysis corpus consists of publications from the Frases de Crianças page on Instagram. As a theoretical basis, we initially turn to Rocha (2008), who discusses the reason why we form new words, in addition to presenting the contributions of generative theory to morphological studies, such as the presentation of Word Formation Rules (RFPs) and the Structural Analysis Rules (RAEs). We also draw upon the contributions of Gonçalves (2016) regarding the studies of derivational neologisms, unmotivated formations, and forms as the only expression of the language, as well as new manifestations of Portuguese morphology. The study showed that children, when creating new words, use the process of analogy of already institutionalized words and use resources such as vocabulary indexes and hybridity.