Abstract:
This paper investigates the sentence processing of two types of coordinate sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: (1) coordinate structure with conjoined objects (nongapping), like Alice baked cakes for her friends and cookies for her cousin; and (2) coordinate structure with VP ellipsis (gapping), like Alice baked cakes for friends and Camila for her cousin. Three experiments were carried out, a written questionnaire in which subjects ranked their preferences for completing the main sentence, such as in “Alice baked cakes for her friends and …”; and two self-paced reading tasks in which we measured the reaction time to read the DP following the conjunction “and” and the PP that follows the DP and undoes a possible ambiguity. This research is based on the works of Carlson (2001CARLSON, Katy. The Effects of Parallelism and Prosody in the Processing of Gapping Structures. Language and Speech, v. 44, n. 1, p. 1-26, 2001., 2002CARLSON, Katy. Parallelism and Prosody in the Processing of Ellipsis Sentences. Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Series. New York: Routledge, 2002.), who investigated the processing of these structures in American English. The results of the three experiments indicate that a simpler syntactic structure (the nongapping) is not always the easiest input for the parser to process.
Keywords:
Ellipsis; Coordinate clauses; Sentence processing; Psycholinguistics; Brazilian Portuguese
