The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics, First Edition. Edited by W. Leo Wetzels, João Costa, and Sergio Menuzzi. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Portuguese shares many morphological features with other Romance languages, such as Castilian, Italian, or French, but it also displays properties that set it apart from the other members of the Romance family. In this chapter, we will privilege the latter aspects. The resem- blance with other romance languages and, at the same time, the specificity of Portuguese morphology further echoes in the comparison of different national varieties, such as the European (henceforth EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) subsystems. Affixation and compounding are the main word‐formation processes in Portuguese. 1 We will present an overview of their main morphological and phonological properties and also some border issues, indicating, when appropriate, contrasts between EP and BP (with reference to the dialects of Lisbon and southern Brazilian variants). In addition, we will discuss some types of word formation not addressed by the grammatical tradition. While influential traditional studies such as Mattoso Câmara (1971) and Basílio (1987), for BP, or Carvalho (1967) and Rio‐Torto (1998), for EP, are discussed where appropriate, the discussion in this chapter is especially based on Villalva (1994), Gonçalves (2004), Gonçalves (2012), and Villalva and Silvestre (2014). In our exposition of the Portuguese word‐formation processes, we assume that words (W), as morphological structures, are projections of the root (R), which is morphologically specified by a thematic constituent 2 (TC) that generates a stem (S). The stem is then morpho- syntactically (MSS)specified. 3 This is the underlying morphological structure of all simple words: (1) [[[X] r [Y] tc ] s [Z] mss ] w Roots are lexical units, specified to a large number of features (their phonological represen- tation and morphological, syntactic and semantic features, among others). One of these features concerns the thematic class to which they belong. Verbs are assigned to a conjugation class (first, second or third), a distinction that has no syntactic or semantic consequences—it is relevant merely for inflection (the phonetics are of the EP variant): (2) 1st C 2nd C 3rd C infinitive canˈt[a]r “to sing” beˈb[e]r “to drink” fuˈg[i]r “to run away” pres.ind. 3rds. ˈcant[ɐ] ˈbeb[ɨ] ˈfog[ɨ] pres.subj.1st/3rd s. ˈcant[ɨ] ˈbeb[ɐ] ˈfuj[ɐ] past participle canˈt[a]do beˈb[i]do fuˈg[i]do The Phonology and Morphology of Word Formation ALINA VILLALVA AND CARLOS ALEXANDRE GONçALVES 10 0002646357.INDD 167 12/22/2015 5:33:56 PM