Adjectival inalienable possession structures: initial notes on its acquisition in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This research aims at advancing the syntactic-semantic analysis of inalienable possession structures presented in Mendes (2017, 2015), by observing Brazilian Portuguese acquisition data compared to its target grammar data. To that end we examined these constructions’ behavior when they occur in predicative and attributive structures (BARON; HERSLUND, 2001) modified by an adjective, because there seem to be, following Kayne’s work (1975) on French, some constraints that block inalienable interpretation  due to the presence and/or the kind of adjective modifying the possessed noun when there is an external possessor in this kind of construction. We assume, by extending Guéron (1985) and Vergnaud & Zubizarreta (1992)'s claims about French, that Kayne’s constraints (1975) concerning adjectival possessive structures are related to their own thematic structure in Brazilian Portuguese. As regards the language acquisition process, although these constraints are not acquired, we hypothesize that inalienable interpretation is overextended, becoming restricted to the conditions licensed by the adult grammar. In order to test the working hypothesis, we advanced an experiment with three groups, two with child informants (younger and older children) and one with adult informants (control group). The results borne out the working hypothesis on the acquisition of these structures, but are not conclusive in relation to the adult Brazilian Portuguese grammar, indicating that, although not being categorical, the present case-study brings important insights on the issue.