The impact of Portuguese on the allomorphy of Mirandese prefixation and circumfixation: phonological conditions

Mirandese is an Iberian-Romance language belonging to the Asturian-Leonese branch, spoken in the Northeast of Portugal, specifically in the territory known as Tierra de Miranda. Mirandese has about 10000 to 15000 speakers, according to the Ethnologue 2019. All the speakers are bilingual, since they also speak Portuguese. The language was subject to social ostracism until the 1990s, when a group of educated native speakers promoted it in collaboration with scholars. Although Mirandese has been a statutory language of provincial identity (Law no. 7/99) since 1999, it is an endangered language. Nowadays, it is used more specifically by educated speakers who aim to improve Mirandese as a language capable of conveying erudite culture. Some published translations, such as a number of books from the Bible, parts of the Odyssey and the complete epic work by Luís Vaz de Camões from 1572, Os Lusíadas, as well as some periodical texts in local newspapers, are examples of this purpose. The raising of Mirandese’s erudition and elitism makes it permeable to Portuguese, the other language of Mirandese bilingual speakers. Permeability occurs in lexical borrowings, as well as in morphological structures, specifically in word formation. The aim of this work is a) to describe the prefixation and circumfixation processes of Mirandese word formation; b) to analyse the permeability of Mirandese to Portuguese in word formation, specifically with regard to these affixation processes; and c) to identify the phonological conditions that model this permeability. To date, there are only two studies on Mirandese word formation (Bautista 2013 and Meirinho 2016). However, Bautista (2013) follows a traditional approach that identifies morphemes by their phonological realization, leaving aside the abstract identity of affixes that takes account of their functionality in mental patterns and allow for allomorphy. Meirinho (2016) studies the influence of translation on the lexical innovation of Mirandese. Although this study departs from Bautista’s approach, the systematisation of the derivational processes is not complete, nor is it immersed in allomorphic phenomena and it does not present a study on its conditions. Thus, the study we present here is seminal. The methodology we have employed is the following: since there are no corpora of Mirandese, we analysed traditional texts such as legends, songs, etc., and erudite texts resulting from translations. We also analysed the only two dictionaries available (Pires 2004 and Ferreira, A., Ferreira, J.P.). The conclusions of the study are: a) if the prefix/first element of a circumfix of the borrowed word has a phonological structure in Portuguese that Mirandese does not admit, phonological conditions remain above direct borrowing; b) if both semantic and phonological transparencies of the Mirandese prefix are high, the autochthonous allomorphs prevail; d) if the phonological transparency of the Mirandese prefix is lower than the correspondent in Portuguese, the Portuguese form will be introduced into Mirandese, as long as it obeys the phonological conditions.