Compreendemos “pintar o sete” e “pintar o quadro” da mesma forma? Um estudo experimental sobre o processamento de expressões idiomáticas no PB

Abstract

This dissertation investigate the comprehension of verb + complement idioms in Brazilian Portuguese (e.g. passar a bola, pintar o sete – literal meaning: “to pass the ball” and “to paint the seven”; figurative meaning: “to delegate responsibility” and “to make a mess”). In Psycholinguistic literature, different approaches related to the representation, the access and the processing of idioms can be recognized. According to direct access models, idioms would be understood from the retrieval of their fully available meaning in the lexicon (GIBBS,1980, 1985, 1986), while other approaches point out that the access occurs in an indirect or mediated way (BOBROW & BELL, 1973; WEINREICH, 1969). There are also proposals that posit that literal and figurative meaning are accessed in parallel (ESTILL & KEMPER, 1982; SWINNEY & CUTLER, 1979), as well as approaches that emphasize the relevance of certain internal and external properties of the idioms (degree of compositionality and crystallization, previous discursive context, for example) for a better understanding of their processing (GIORA, 1997, 1999; BOWDLE & GENTNER, 2005). Our research is in line with the last vision that denies the possibility of a categorical approach that can account for the processing of any expression without taking into account the specific aspects involved in each case. Idioms are typically characterized as fixed and non-compositional combinations in which meaning is not a function of the sum of the parts. The degree of compositionality, however, is variable (GIBBS, 1989): in some cases, the parts collaborate in the construction of the figurative meaning, in others, this contribution is not clear. In expressions such as passar a bola, for example, one perceives a greater decomposition than in dar zebra (literal meaning: “to give zebra”; figurative meaning: “to go wrong”) or in pintar o sete. Thus, a spectrum of idiomaticity is observed. This research intends to explore to what extent the degree of idiomaticity affects the comprehension of idioms. We also investigate the role of the speaker's familiarity with the idiom and the previous context in which the idiom appear and evaluate the extent to which these factors interact with each other in the processing. Two experiments were conducted to investigate these issues. In the Experiment 1, a maze task (self-paced reading in the form of a "labyrinth") was used. The critical segment was related to the verb complement: idiomatic complement vs. literal complement (e.g. open the heart/ the door). Experiment 2 was inspired by the research of Cacciari and Tabossi (1988), based on the cross-modal priming paradigm, and conducted by means of a lexical decision task in which the target could be related idiomatically, literally or unrelated to the idiom (e.g. passar a bola – “to pass the ball”; target words: responsibility – soccer player - helicopter). Taken together, the obtained results revealed significant effects of the three investigated variables, suggesting that the degree of idiomaticity, the speaker's familiarity with the idiom and the previous context affect the processing of the idioms and, therefore, should be considered in a model that aims to explain the representation, access and comprehension of these structures.