Concordância nominal variável na produção infantil: dados naturalísticos, experimentais e caracterização formal

Abstract

This thesis investigates the variable realization of nominal agreement ( redundant X non-redundant) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and aims to propose a formalization for the phenomenon based on data produced by adults and children. In empirical terms, based on the articulation between spontaneous longitudinal data and experimental methodology, our study explores: (i) the possible effects of phonic salience on adult and child production of the nominal agreement patterns; (ii) the role of extralinguistic aspects, such as level of education, age and origin of the speaker in the alternation between such patterns and (iii) the relationship between the alternation of the patterns and a set of structural and morphological aspects such as, the configuration of the structure, the nature of the phrase head, the morphology of numerals, etc. In theoretical terms, we aim at providing a formal account for the alternation of plural marking patterns identified in the data, combining the theoretical framework provided by the Minimalist Program (CHOMSKY, 1993, 1995, 1999) and the 4M Model (MYERS-SCOTTON; JAKE, 2000a). Regarding naturalistic data, the results obtained from three corpora are reported, comprising the spontaneous production of children in contexts of interaction with their primary caregivers or with their teacher. Regarding experimental data, the results of a study conducted with BP-speaking children and adults are reported. Concerning the phonic salience of the nouns, the naturalistic and experimental results are not compatible with a significant effect of this variable. Regarding the production of redundant and non-redundant plural phrases by children and adults, it was observed that in the spontaneous production data, the behavior of children seems to reflect the pattern registered in adult speech. The results of the experimental study, in turn, indicate crucial differences between adult and child production. Issues associated with the nature of the communicative situation in each case may explain the differences. In theoretical terms, the results obtained both through naturalistic and experimental methodology and the resulting interpretation are compatible with the an approach formutaled in the context of the 4-M Theory to explain the phenomenon of variable number agreement in BP. We claim that nonredundant agreement is licensed by the type of morpheme involved and its features, as well as the relationships they establish in the Agree system(CHOMSKY, 1999, 2001). More specifically, we propose that the number morpheme in the determiner is an early system morpheme, and the number morpheme in the noun and adjective is a late system morpheme. In line with the Agree system, we propose that the former are valued and interpretable and that the later correspond to unvalued and uninterpretable features. Based on this reasoning, we propose – according to Frampton and Guttman’s (2000) system, and the proposal of Pesetsky and Torrego (2007) – that the agreement mechanism actually involves features sharing.