Nome e adjetivo na aquisição do português brasileiro: o uso da marca morfofonológica de gênero do adjetivo para o estabelecimento da referência

Abstract

This dissertation, as an experimental study, focuses on the delimitation of adjective category by infants acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as their first language. It investigates if formal properties of gender inflection affixes of adjectives and nouns are represented by infants at the age of 2-3, enabling them to identify such features in the phonetic interface in order to interpret them in the semantic one, so that, starting from noun agreement, they can establish reference as well as adult speakers do. The research is based on a linguistic theory that considers the language acquisition problem – especially the Principles and Parameters Theory, in terms of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995-2001) – and psycholinguistic approaches that consider, as forms of bootstrap language acquisition: (i) the treatment of the acoustic signal of speech (phonological bootstrapping: Morgan & Demuth, 1996; Christophe et al., 1997); (ii) the analysis of linguistic material by infants in lexical meaning acquisition (syntactic bootstrapping: Gleitman, 1990). Three experimental tasks were carried out: the first one, involved native BP speakers and foreign adult speakers learning BP as a second language. It aimed to verify their preference in associating adjective to noun in sentences with two possible syntactic structures – reference to Subject Noun (SN) or to Object Noun (ON): (1a) O pai abraçou o filho triste and (1b) A atriz beijou a cantora emocionada. The second one, involving infants between 2-3 years of life, aimed to investigate their ability to identify the adjective‟s morphophonological feature of gender in order to associate it with the Noun to which it is referring in sentences such as: (2a) O papai abraçou a filhinha cansado and (2b) O filhinho olhou a mamãe nervosa. The third experiment involved infants at the same age of the second one and it aimed to verify their preference in associating the adjective with the noun in sentences with two possible syntactic structures – reference to Subject Noun (SN) or to Object Noun (ON): (3a) A mamãe olhou a filhinha assustada and (3b) O filhinho olhou o papai cansado. In the first and in the third experiments, sentences were ambiguous regarding the 8 adjunction of adjective to the NP-object (NP2) or to the NP-subject (NP1), allowing the attribute apposition to be local, associated with NP2, or non-local, associated with NP1. Results suggest that, based on the principles of Late closure and Minimal Attachment (FRAZIER, 1979), local apposition is the default choice to such structure, both for adult speakers and for infants. Second experiment results indicate that infants producing sentences with more than two words are able to identify, in phonetic interface, the information related to adjective gender and they are also able to interpret it in semantic interface in order to attribute the property expressed by adjective to a noun, therefore, establishing reference.