Resumen de PP Coordination, Embedding and Feature Sharing: seeking the connections between notation and processing
Tom Roeper, Marcus Maia, Sabrina Santos
- English
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) presents different strategies for the formation of relative clauses: the standard, the resumptive, and the PP-chopping version (Tarallo, 1983). Resumptive relative clauses are less frequent, associated to low schooling, and generally favored when there is a greater linear distance between the gap position and the antecedent, and when the former presents [+ human], [-definite, -specific] features (Mollica, 1977; 2003). As for its processing cost, a resumptive pronoun (RP) that occupies the position where a gap is expected could give rise to the so-called Filled-gap effect (Stowe, 1986; Crain & Fodor, 1985; Maia, 2014). In self-paced reading experiments, the presence of a DP in the position of a gap leads to slower reading times. In this study, we examine to what extent RPs may cause Filled-gap effect and whether the associated processing load can be reversed, given its grammaticality in BP. We applied a self-paced reading experiment to 28 participants, who read sentences divided into segments, presenting three types of relative clauses: gapped (grammatical), filled gap with DP (ungrammatical), and resumptive (grammatical), in addition to control sentences. Our results, based on the reading times of the critical segment, the spill-over region, and the last two segments, show a cost associated with RPs in the critical segment, which, however, is soon reverted in the spill-over region and the last segments, for which RPs yield the fastest reading times. Thus, these results corroborate the assumption that this structure is legitimate in BP, despite not being very prestigious
- English
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) presents different strategies for the formation of relative clauses: the standard, the resumptive, and the PP-chopping version (Tarallo, 1983). Resumptive relative clauses are less frequent, associated to low schooling, and generally favored when there is a greater linear distance between the gap position and the antecedent, and when the former presents [+ human], [-definite, -specific] features (Mollica, 1977; 2003). As for its processing cost, a resumptive pronoun (RP) that occupies the position where a gap is expected could give rise to the so-called Filled-gap effect (Stowe, 1986; Crain & Fodor, 1985; Maia, 2014). In self-paced reading experiments, the presence of a DP in the position of a gap leads to slower reading times. In this study, we examine to what extent RPs may cause Filled-gap effect and whether the associated processing load can be reversed, given its grammaticality in BP. We applied a self-paced reading experiment to 28 participants, who read sentences divided into segments, presenting three types of relative clauses: gapped (grammatical), filled gap with DP (ungrammatical), and resumptive (grammatical), in addition to control sentences. Our results, based on the reading times of the critical segment, the spill-over region, and the last two segments, show a cost associated with RPs in the critical segment, which, however, is soon reverted in the spill-over region and the last segments, for which RPs yield the fastest reading times. Thus, these results corroborate the assumption thatthis structure is legitimate in BP, despite not being very prestigious.
