Open AccessAn investigation on the role of referentiality in the interpretation of relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese
Author(s) -
Gitanna Brito Bezerra
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
ilha do desterro
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.223
H-Index - 6
eISSN - 2175-8026
pISSN - 0101-4846
DOI - 10.5007/2175-8026.2022.e82530
Subject(s) - interpretation (philosophy) , noun phrase , relative clause , linguistics , portuguese , noun , brazilian portuguese , semantic interpretation , explanatory power , natural language processing , computer science , mathematics , psychology , philosophy , epistemology
This paper presents an off-line experiment we conducted to investigate theinfluence of referentiality on relative clause (RC) interpretation in BrazilianPortuguese. RCs associated with complex NPs seem to be preferentiallyattached to a referential noun. This referentiality effect can be treated indiscourse terms (Gilboy, Sopena, Clifton & Frazier, 1995) or in syntacticsemanticterms (Bezerra, 2017; this paper). Our questionnaire tested theseapproaches using two types of complex NPs (occupational and kinshipNPs) and the results showed that the syntactic-semantic structure ofthese complex NPs can account for the referentiality effect reported in theliterature by Gilboy et al. (1995). Based on our results, we argue in favorof the syntactic-semantic approach and show that the discourse-orientedapproach lacks explanatory power.