A predição linguística em casos de estrangeirismo do inglês em português brasileiro

Abstract

In the present study, we aim to investigate whether anglicisms originating from the English language used in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) undergo the same anticipatory process (predictive) as words originally from BP. In daily conversation, we are constantly making anticipations about what people are going to say in order to form, in our minds, a context that allows us to process the received information more efficiently. We refer to this phenomenon as anticipatory processing (Clark, 2013). With the purpose of better and more rapidly understanding what is being said in a conversation, we use our world knowledge to make predictions. According to Kuperberg and Jaeger (2016:23), prediction implies that, at any moment, we use high-level information within our representation of context, as the brain develops a hierarchical (top-down) model, to probabilistically infer (hypothesize) future information in that same higher-level representation. Therefore, in everyday interaction (speech), we are constantly making anticipations automatically, even if there are anglicisms in that interaction. This occurs because these words are part of our language, albeit borrowed. Therefore, this study seeks to analyze how linguistic anticipation occurs within the reading of English anglicisms. For this purpose, two experiments were conducted. Experiment I evaluated the knowledge of Brazilian participants about BP anglicisms. The anglicisms were selected from texts and social networks in Portuguese, and their frequency was verified on the google.com website in Portuguese. Participants with English as a second language (L2) were tested for ease of recognizing and attributing meanings to the anglicisms. The results showed that participants marked all listed anglicisms as "familiar," providing examples of usage. Some anglicisms marked as "unfamiliar" were not recognized by participants with self-declared English levels as "Basic/None." These results suggest that anglicisms, once incorporated, are fully part of BP, and that the prediction of anglicisms may be similar to that of words in Portuguese. In Experiment II, the familiarity and acceptability of English anglicisms in BP sentences were assessed. Participants were asked to choose between two options of words or expressions in order to organize acceptable sentences in BP, choosing between anglicisms and Portuguese words. The results indicated that the response time (RT) to choose between anglicisms and Portuguese words was practically the same, suggesting a similar prediction for both. Thus, it can be concluded that anglicisms, adapted to the language, undergo a predictive process similar to that of Portuguese words, being significantly integrated into BP.