Velhas e novas classes de formativos e de processos de construção de palavras o caso particular de splintering e de fractocomposição

The present study describes the classes of formatives and processes of word construction, such as (i) affixation and composition, the most established and stabilized, (ii) blending/lexical fusion and clipping/shortening, less represented than the previous ones, and (iii) some of the most innovative, such as those operating with splinters. The legitimation of these formatives, with origin in non-morphememic segments that acquire, as a result of reanalysis, morfolexical status, poses the problem of the nature of the processs in which they operate. Once the autonomy from blending is established, the proximity of splintering to affixation and composition is discussed, and the fractocomposition is proposed as the subclass in which splinters can be enrolled, together with other fractoformatives. In order to characterize these formatives, in this study the processes’categorization is based on the ±bound, ±fragmented/splintered and/or ±clipped nature of the formatives.