Prosody, semantic parallelism and pragmatic context in the processing of gapping sentences

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigated the processing of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and American English (AE) coordinated sentences with gapping ellipsis. This type of ellipsis is an optional syntactic process that consists of eliding the main verb – and other constituents, when possible – of the second clause of a coordinated structure (SAG, 1980; CARLSON, 2002). In this research, we explore BP gapping sentences with temporary structural ambiguity of the DP in the second clause, such as (1) Alice assou bolos para suas amigas e Camila para sua prima (Alice baked cakes for her friends and Camila for her cousin); and BP and AE sentences with subject versus object ambiguity, such as: O Pedro levou a Júlia na festa e o Bruno no churrasco da empresa / Peter took Julia to the party and Brian to the company barbecue. In example (1), the DP Camila is structurally ambiguous because it cannot be conjoined as a direct object of the verb assar (bake), which accepts only inanimate nouns as its direct object. Thus, the DP Camila should be interpreted as the subject of a new clause (Camila baked cakes) to avoid a semantic/pragmatic anomalous sentence. On the other hand, the DP Bruno/Brian can be interpreted as the subject of a new clause (gapping interpretation) or as the conjoined direct object of the verb (conjunction reduction interpretation) in example (2). Experimental evidence from previous research (CARLSON, 2002, 2005; HOEKS et al., 2002, 2006, 2009; SILVA et al., 2018) reveals a strong preference for conjunction reduction interpretation of coordinate sentences due to structural simplicity bias, which is aligned with the Minimal Attachment Principle (FRAZIER, 1979, 1987) and a topic complex structure (HOEKS et al., 2002, 2006), that is, two subjects in the syntactic structure. This thesis took a Psycholinguistic approach (LEITÃO, 2008) conducted offline and online experiments with gapping written and oral sentences. The sentences were explored with regard to their prosodic cues, semantic parallelism between nouns in the two conjuncts, biasing pragmatic contexts and visual cues. We aimed to find out the role of these features in the processing and in determining the final interpretation of the gapping sentences. The results indicate that gapping interpretation is the most preferred in both BP and AE when both prosodic, semantic, and pragmatic cues bias subject interpretation of the ambiguous noun in the second conjunct (Bruno/Brian). Therefore, we conclude that both linguistic and non-linguistic information is relevant to bias a gapping syntactic structure analysis in both BP and AE.