AN INVESTIGATION ON THE ROLE OF REFERENTIALITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

Bezerra, Gitanna

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2022.e82530

Abstract

This paper presents an off-line experiment we conducted to investigate the influence of referentiality on relative clause (RC) interpretation in Brazilian Portuguese. RCs associated with complex NPs seem to be preferentially attached to a referential noun. This referentiality effect can be treated in discourse terms (Gilboy, Sopena, Clifton & Frazier, 1995Gilboy, E., Sopena, J., Clifton, C. Jr., & Frazier, L. (1995). Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs. Cognition, 54, 131-167.) or in syntactic-semantic terms (Bezerra, 2017Bezerra, G. B. (2017). A influência da referencialidade no processamento de orações relativas associadas a NPs complexos do tipo “substância” (Doctoral thesis, Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brasil).; this paper). Our questionnaire tested these approaches using two types of complex NPs (occupational and kinship NPs) and the results showed that the syntactic-semantic structure of these complex NPs can account for the referentiality effect reported in the literature by Gilboy et al. (1995)Gilboy, E., Sopena, J., Clifton, C. Jr., & Frazier, L. (1995). Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs. Cognition, 54, 131-167.. Based on our results, we argue in favor of the syntactic-semantic approach and show that the discourse-oriented approach lacks explanatory power.

Keywords
Relative Clause Processing; Referentiality; Complex Noun Phrases; Brazilian Portuguese

[1] *
Has a Ph.D. in Linguistics (Federal University of Paraiba, Brazil) and a Post-Doctorate in Linguistics (University of Toronto, Canada). Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where she is developing a research project on relative clause processing. She develops research on sentence processing from a grammatical perspective, focusing on phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. E-mail: gitannabezerra@gmail.com.

Experimental Condition	% N1 and N2 responses	X² results
ANRN2	N1: 66.84%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 67.34, p < .001$
ANRN2	N2: 33.16%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 67.34, p < .001$
ARN2	N1: 47.81%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 1.138, p = 0.28$
ARN2	N2: 52.19%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 1.138, p = 0.28$
BNRN2	N1: 57.24%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 12.451, p < .001$
BNRN2	N2: 42.76%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 12.451, p < .001$
BRN2	N1: 50.34%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 0.026936, p = 0.86$
	N2: 49.66%	$X^{2} (1, N = 99) = 0.026936, p = 0.86$