Silent Constituents in the Grammar of Portuguese

Funder

Organizational Unit

Publications

Processamento de relações anafóricas com sujeitos omitidos em Português Europeu

Publication . Costa, Armanda; Matos, Gabriela; Luegi, Paula

The current study deals with referential chains’ processing in finite clauses in European Portuguese, involving different types of subject gaps: pro, wh-variable and NPcopy. Since conditions of economy guide syntactic processing, we raised the hypothesis that the less referential is the content of the null element and the more minimal is the distance between the antecedent and the gap, the lower are the costs of the cognitive processing. We conducted an eye-tracking reading experiment and we measured the reading time per character. The results obtained show that the online processing of coreferential pro was costlier than the processing of wh-variable and NP-copy.

2010Journal article

Open access

The alternation between improper indirect questions and restrictive relatives.

Publication . Matos, Gabriela; Brito, Ana Maria

This paper analyses the alternation between improper indirect questions and DPs containing a restrictive relative in European Portuguese. We propose that this alternation is lexically restricted, only occurring with weakly assertive cognitive definite predicates, in the sense of Hinzen and Sheehan (2011), such as saber, 'to know' or descobrir, 'to discover'. We also claim that the alternation between an improper indirect wh-CP and a DP containing a restricitive relative is possible because they share significant features, namely they both involve sentences qirh declarative illocutionary force and wh/operator chains, and exhibit a high level of referentiality, due to the D-linked nature of the whP in the improper indirect question and the definite and specific nature of the DP that includes the relative.

2013Book part

Restricted access

The Problem of Fragment Answers

Publication . Santos, Ana Lúcia

In this paper, I discuss the status of fragment answers to yes-no questions, based on facts from European Portuguese. I argue, along the lines of argumentation in Merchant (2004), that there is reason to believe that at least some of these fragments are derived through deletion. However, I show that data from EP does not support Merchant’s analysis of fragments as constituents moved to the left periphery before deletion. This leaves us with the problem of non-constituent deletion, which I argue is not a problem for a phonological deletion theory of ellipsis.

2009Journal article

Open access

Prosodic structure, constituents and their representations

Publication . Frota, Sόnia

2012Book part

Open access

A focus intonational morpheme in European Portuguese: Production and perception

Publication . Frota, Sónia

Production studies of the intonational signalling of focus in European Portuguese (EP) have shown that focus is expressed by a specific pitch accent type, thus revealing a systematic contrast between nuclear accents associated with different meanings. In declarative utterances, the contrast between the neutral/broad focus reading and the narrow/contrastive focus reading is essentially realized as an alignment difference: H+L* (neutral accent) and H*+L (focus accent). A pilot perceptual study using natural stimuli has shown that subjects are able to distinguish between members of neutral/focus minimal pairs and to match them to the appropriate production context. However, the perception of the contrast found in production has not yet been investigated in detail. The present paper revisits the production contrast and investigates its categorical nature using a multiple methodology approach that resorts to semantically motivated tasks. Several experiments tested whether differences in F0 peak and valley alignment would trigger a perceptual change from one meaning to the other, and whether the alignment differences pattern alike in stimuli based on a neutral and a focus sentence. In Experiment 1, stimuli were classified in a context-matching identification task. In Experiment 2, participants rated appropriateness of stimulus to context in a semantic scaling task. Finally, in Experiment 3, pairs of stimuli were discriminated in a context-matching discrimination task. The results of the three experiments provide converging evidence for the distinction between H+L* and H*+L. Moreover, they support the claim that the neutral/focus accent distinction is primarily an alignment contrast phonologically encoded at the pitch accent level. These findings have implications for the understanding of the nature of intonational contrasts, and the discussion about the approaches and methods to define prosodic categories.

2012Journal article

Open access