Terminological variation in processes and elements of morphic analysis

Abstract

This study deals with terminological variation within the scope of Portuguese Morphology, namely terms used in morphic analysis. To achieve this objective, we point out the main conceptual aspects that consolidated Terminology as one of the disciplines dedicated to the study of the lexicon. The corpus from which we extracted the data is composed of a set of works on morphological studies of the Portuguese language, namely: Câmara Jr. (1988), Kehdi (1990), Laroca (2003), Monteiro (2002) and Rosa (2011). After presenting key concepts of Terminology and contextualizing historical aspects and concepts related to Morphology, we compare and analyze, from the perspective of the Communicative Theory of Terminology (TCT), the terms a) alomorfe; b) substituição and comutação; c) vocábulo and palavra e d) radical and raiz. In this way, we found occurrences of non-variation, terminological synonymy, or denominative variation, and formal variants that we could designate as “almost synonyms”, since, despite the existence of equivalences in certain contexts, they present distinctive semantic traces and are conditioned to debatable and not generalizing criteria. The external interferences, in turn, were dialectal, discursive, interlinguistic and cognitive in nature. With regard to the functional type, no differences were identified between types of records and degrees of specialty, given that the researched works are characteristically introductory.