O papel das fronteiras de sintagma fonológico na restrição do processamento sintático e na delimitação das categorias lexicais

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of phonological phrase boundaries () on the identification of lexical categories in Brazilian Portuguese. The start point assumption is that lexical categories are identified based on the syntactic structure (BAKER, 2003). On the other hand, the syntactic structure is mapped by the prosodic structure. Thus, the working hypothesis adopted is that, since the prosodic structure constrains the syntactic structure, it allows, in consequence, the identification of lexical categories of ambiguous terms. We assume the integration between the Minimalist Program (CHOMSKY, 1995; 1999) and the Phonological Bootstrapping Model (MORGAN and DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997), in terms of Corrêa (2006), as well as a Processing Model (Integrated Model of Linguistic Competence, MICL: CORRÊA and AUGUSTO, 2006). We also assume the Prosodic Phonology (NESPOR and VOGEL, 1986) which argues that the phonological units are hierarchically organized and that there is a relation between the prosodic e the syntactic constituents, even though that relation may not be obligatory. Based on the studies of Millotte et al. (2007) in French, two experimental activities were devolved in order to verify how the sensibility to prosodic cues may constrain the syntactic processing of sentences and allow the identification of lexical categories ADJ and V. Both experiments used sentences containing ambiguous words in the condition Verb – [a menina] [LIMPA...] (the girl CLEANS) – and in the condition Adjective – [a menina LIMPA] (the CLEAN girl). In Experiment 1, we tried to verify the acoustic differences between the two conditions in the phonological phrase boundaries. We measured the values of duration, fundamental frequency and intensity at the end of the prosodic boundaries. The analysis of those values revealed that (i) there are prosodic differences that signalize the existence of phonological phrase boundaries; (ii) the lexical categories N, V and ADJ have different behaviors in the prosodic structure. The Experiment 2 tested if, depending exclusively on the prosodic context, the participants were capable of identifying the syntactic categories of the ambiguous elements. The results support the hypothesis that prosodic cues present on the phonological phrase boundaries help constraining the syntactic processing and, in consequence, the identification of the lexical categories.