The processing of the double object construction by Brazilian monolinguals and late Brazilian-Portuguese English bilinguals

• Ano de defesa: 2018
• Autor(a) principal: Alberto Gallo Araujo Penzin
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Palavras-chave em Português: Aquisição da segunda linguagem; Bilingüismo; Gramatica comparada e geral Sintaxe; Construção de objeto duplo; compartilhamento sintático; bilinguismo
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/1843/LETR-AZNMYX

The double-object construction (DOC) has received the attention of many researchers in linguistic theory. This construction is part of a cluster of similar structures termed dative constructions by Goldberg (1995). There is evidence in the literature which suggests the existence of this construction in certain dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). However, experimental (SOUZA et. al, 2016) and corpora-based (ZARA, 2014) evidence point to little productivity of this structure. On the other hand, in the English language the double-object construction is the most productive (CAMPBELL & TOMASELLO, 2001). Some authors(GUIMARÃES, 2016; OLIVEIRA et al., 2017; SOUZA, 2012; SOUZA et al., 2014) have found evidence for the influence of the weaker language (L2) on the stronger language (L1) on the level of syntax. It suggests that access to syntactic representations of both languages is shared by bilinguals irrespective of language. This thesis employs an experimentalmethodology in order to find evidence for the acceptance of the DOC in monolinguals, as well as a possible bilingualism effect on BP-English bilinguals. In Experiment I, both populations read sentences in BP on a self-paced reading task followed by a timed acceptability judgement task. Zara (2014) also found that only high proficiency bilinguals accepted sentences with two direct objects in English. The acquisition of said construction is not trivial, in that it has some subtle constraints related to syntax and semantics. In Experiment II, low and high proficiency bilinguals performed in English the same tasks previously mentioned, but with licit and illicit forms of the DOC. The results for the firstexperiment suggest that monolinguals accepted structures with two objects in BP fairly well, despite it not possessing the same grammaticality status as the most common structure, theprepositional double object; moreover, no bilingualism effect was found for the bilinguals in both on-line and off-line responses. The results for the second experiment suggest that both low and high bilinguals were able to detect verb violations as well as violations of animacyinvolving the DOC. Also, we found an influence of L1 on the preference for the prepositional construction in the L2.