This paper aims to analyse the word formation focusing the use of the -rana suffix in the Portuguese spoken in six places located in the region of the Mid Solimões in the State of Amazonas. The corpus for the analysis was taken from the answers given by the informants to a semantic-lexical questionnaire in Azevedo's thesis, which is on development and is about the dialectical variation in the Low Amazonas and Mid Solimões regions. For the purposes of the research, our theorectical foundation was based on the generative morphology model in order to make possible the construction of a rule to be applied to the bases that are selected by this suffix. The results have shown the existence of neological formations, once they had not been found in any lexicographic works. Furthermore, the -rana suffix, when selecting noun bases, does not change the primitive grammatical category to form new nouns. Due to its regularity, it was possible for us to formulate a rule of word formation for the -rana suffix in the Portuguese spoken in that Brazilian Amazonia region.
Lexicology; Generative Morphology; Amazonian region; -rana Suffix
