Processing it-cleft sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: an ERP study of leftward-moved constituents in role-reversed sentences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2020.v16nEsp.a43720Keywords:
ERP, sentence processing, role reversal structures.Abstract
In this paper we deepened on the processing of cleft role-reversed structures, based on empirical evidence of standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We used the electrophysiological technique (EEG/ERP) to map distinguished syntactic and semantic processes, for instance, the N400 and the P600, addressing the focus structures in It-clefts clauses structured in three different experimental conditions: (i) Congruous Cleft Condition: It was the SURFER that the shark attacked in Hawaii; (ii) Reversed Cleft Condition: It was the SHARK that the surfer attacked in Hawaii; and (iii) Incongruous Cleft Condition: It was the COUCH that the shark attacked in Hawaii. Taken together, our findings suggest that the presence of P600s related to role-reversed sentences in previous studies could be attributed to the syntactic reanalysis, instead of the processing of the role reversed item per se. Also, the presence of an N400 effect to the reversals could be due to the frustration of the strong combination of contextual constraints and strong lexical association. Our results make a unique contribution to the ERP response profiles, specially regarding the relationship between the role-reversals and the animacy violations in the Cleft structural frame. Our ERP findings seem to be compatible with the long-held assumption that the N400 and P600 appear to be modulated by the subject-object asymmetry, and were sensitive to, respectively, the semantic attraction between words in the sentences and, the congruency of the predicate. We thus claim that the syntactic anomalies blocked the detection of semantic anomalies, therefore, semantically incongruous sentences, such as role-reversals were perceived to be odd due to a syntactic constraint satisfaction that assigns the right theta-roles to the verbs arguments despite the semantic cues.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
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.
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).