Processamento prosódico na compreensão e produção de estruturas de tópico e sujeito no Português Brasileiro

Abstract

This study aims to investigate through experimental evidence the role of prosody in the processes of comprehension and production of sentences in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) with the topic-comment syntactic structure and sentences with the syntactic structure of subject-predicate, in active or passive voice. Topicalization is a highly productive syntactic-discursive phenomenon in natural languages (KENEDY, 2011). In BP, topicalized structures are recurrent in colloquial speech, although they are not very common constructions in written language. The topics were chosen as object of study because (i) these structures have particular prosodic characteristics (MORAES & ORSINI, 2003), which allow us to distinguish them from the subject-predicate structure; (ii) because there are few studies that explore these constructions in an experimental perspective (KENEDY, 2011 and 2014; SILVA, 2015); (iii) because there are few prosody-syntax interface studies that investigate whether prosodic information can also guide the processing of syntactic structures without any local ambiguity; (iv) because there is an uncertainty about BP status in Li & Thompson’s typology of languages (1976), that is, if BP spoken language is subject-prominent and topic-prominent (PONTES, 1987, ORSINI, 2003, among others), or if it is just subject-prominent (KENEDY, 2011 and 2014). Three experimental activities were proposed in order to achieve the aim of this research. Experiment 1 consisted of a perception test with ABX technique. The aim was to investigate if hearers recognize prosodic differences between topicalized Noun Phrases (NPs) and NPs in subject position. Experiment 2 consisted of a Cross-modal naming task, which is a type of a sentence elicitation task. The aim was to investigate whether Portuguese native speakers produce a subject-predicate structure or a topic-comment structure in contexts that favor the occurrence of such syntactic structures in speech. Experiment 3 consisted of Self-paced Listening and Reading task. The aim was to investigate whether the prosodic characteristics of an NP, in a topic or non-topicalized position, are informative to guide linguistic processing. It also investigates if speakers use those prosodic characteristics to make a distinction between the two syntactic structures. The results of the experiments suggest that speakers recognize the prosodic differences of topicalized and subject NPs and use these characteristics during linguistic processing. The results also indicate that speakers produce structures consistent with a topic or a subject syntactic structure when the context favors one of them. With regard to typological status of BP, our results suggest that BP speakers prefer the subject structure rather than the topic structure.