Relações de interface sintaxe-semântica e sintaxe-discurso/pragmática: um estudo sobre o processamento de nominais nus no PB

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of bare nouns (BN) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) from the perspective of linguistic processing. There are several studies about the BP bare singular and bare plural related to a semantic characterization and usage restrictions, mainly within the scope of Formal Semantics. But how could this phenomenon be characterized in cognitive terms? Thus, we hypothesized that the realization of BNs in BP seems to be conditioned to syntactic-semantic, but also discursive/pragmatic factors, involving knowledge of linguistic and general domains. The second hypothesis that guides this research is that the L1 (Spanish), which has the NP restricted to the syntax-semantic interface, influences the processing of the NN in the L2 (BP) generating difficulty in accessing the syntax-discourse/pragmatic interface, and, consequently, instability. According to the Interface Hypothesis, phenomena within interfaces external to the grammar would be more sensitive to optionality and interlinguistic influences compared to phenomena concerning interfaces between internal modules. Certain language models, adopted in this study, demonstrates the interaction between intrinsically linguistic levels (interfaces between syntax-semantics or syntaxphonology) and between linguistic levels and other levels of general cognition (interactions between syntax-discourse/pragmatics). In the empirical investigation, we applied three experiments of elicited production. In the first, monolingual BP speakers participated, in the second and third bilingual Spanish speakers (L1)/BP (L2). BP differs from Spanish in the acceptability of BNs in pre-verbal position, because this not allows the use of pre-verbal BN in generic, kind and episodic sentences. On the other hand, BP accepts bare singular and bare plural only with restriction to the bare singular in episodic predicate. The goals of these experiments were: (i) to evaluate the use of BN in the production of sentences in the generic, kind and episodic semantic aspects in pre-verbal position in BP; (ii) whether BNs are produced with and without number mark; in addition, regard to Spanish bilingual speakers (L1)/BP (L2), we sought to (iii) assess whether patterns in the native language could interfere with their performance in the BP production task. Our results suggest that in monolingual processing there is a preference for bare plural in kind predicates, with significant differences, comparing to bare singular, which shows that the semantic aspect and the number mark also influence the processing of the BN. In the experiments with bilinguals, we also observed a greater number of bare plural productions in the kind predicate, but still in a much lower percentage than the natives. Bilinguals, in general, avoided the bare singular and bare plural in generic sentences, which points to the influence of the grammar of the native language when producing the noun phrases in L2. Therefore, we argue that in BP, the pre-verbal BN is a phenomenon that involves, in its processing, interfaces between the internal (syntaxsemantic) and external (syntax-discourse/pragmatics) domains.