The acceptability of the pre-verbal bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese

Authors

  • Raíssa Silva Santana Universidade de São Paulo
  • Elaine Grolla Universidade de São Paulo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2018.v14n2a17532

Keywords:

Preverbal bare singulars, Contrastive focus, Genericity, Acceptability Judgment task

Abstract

Our research investigates the judgements of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) native speakers with respect to preverbal bare singulars, considering the proposal that pragmatic factors such as contrastive focus might improve the acceptability of the constructions headed by this nominal. In an Acceptability Judgment Task, 20 native speakers of BP judged constructions with preverbal bare singulars within: i) generic sentences; ii) kind-predicate sentences; iii) stage-level predicate sentences. The results suggest that contrastive focus might interfere with the acceptability of these constructions, and that sentences with kind-predicates are grammatical in BP. Sentences with stage-level predicates received low rates of acceptance.

 

---

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2018.v14n2a17532.

Author Biographies

Raíssa Silva Santana, Universidade de São Paulo

Estudante de mestrado no Departamento de Linguística da Uiversidade de São Paulo. Membro do laboratório de Estudos em Aquisição da Linguagem (LEAL).

Elaine Grolla, Universidade de São Paulo

Professora Doutora no Departamento de Linguística da Universidade de São Paulo. Coordenadora do laboratório de Estudos em Aquisição da Linguagem.

Downloads

Published

2018-09-15

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 2 (2018): Estudos Experimentais sobre o Português

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish in the Revista Linguí∫tica agree with the following terms:

The authors maintain their rights, ceding to the journal the right to first publication of the article, simultaneously submitted to a Creative Commons license permitting the sharing with third-parties of published content as long as it mentions the author and its first publication in the Revista Linguí∫tica.

Authors may enter into additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of their published work (for example, posting in online institutional or non-profit repositories, or book chapters) so long as they acknowledge its initial publication in the Revista Linguí∫tica.

 

Licença Creative Commons
The journal Revista Linguí∫tica is published by the Post-Graduate program in Linguistics of UFRJ and employs a Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC).