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The Role of Grammaticality Judgments Within an Integral Approach to Brazilian Portuguese Bare Nominals

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Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 44))

Abstract

This paper is mainly concerned with two points: The first one is a better theoretical foundation of the interpretation of acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs) in studies on Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) bare nominals (BNs). I draw on Bader and Häussler’s (J Linguist 46(2):273–330, 2010) model, which is based on signal detection theory, and show that an (explicitly or implicitly) binary approach to AJTs on BrP BNs fails to capture the whole picture. This is exemplified by contrasting the two AJT studies on specific and definite BNs presented in this paper with other experimental approaches to BrP BNs. The second concern is the status of these rather marginal forms in BrP. It will be claimed that only an approach combining different empirical methods can give a sufficiently clear picture. In order to support this claim, a third experiment, namely an elicitation task, will be presented and discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a recent discussion of Schmitt and Munn’s claim with regard to “semantic parameterization” and the role of the BrP data as counter-evidence to Chierchia (1998), see Dayal (2011, pp. 1103ff.) and references therein.

  2. 2.

    This term is nothing more than a descriptive label, indicating the absence of plural morphology (bare nominals might also include bare plurals).

  3. 3.

    For a detailed review of Schmitt and Munn’s original claims, see Braga et al. (2010).

  4. 4.

    Braga et al. take this term from Rothstein (2010), where it refers to inherent individuability in contrast to “formal atomicity” (being an atom in a Boolean structure) and “semantic atomicity” (atomicity relative to a certain context).

  5. 5.

    Bader and Häussler develop their theory by testing and comparing different judgment methods, namely magnitude estimation, speeded binary grammaticality judgments and “off-line” binary grammaticality judgments. The phenomena tested are German word order, case and argument alternation.

  6. 6.

    See e.g., the special issue on BNs of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics (Pires de Oliveira 2010), featuring many examples marked with a question mark or reports of diverging judgments by different speakers.

  7. 7.

    All the sentence materials, instructions and a digital version of the questionnaire are freely available online: http://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0000-1CCA-E (Experiment 1), http://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0000-1CCB-D (Experiment 2), and http://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0000-1CCC-C (Experiment 3).

  8. 8.

    The “Letras” curriculum includes courses in language, literature, and linguistics. Proficiency in second languages was not tested. It was also not asked explicitly whether the informants grew up monolingually or not, but for most of them this can be safely assumed.

  9. 9.

    Sometimes, if the interpretation of the target sentence without context was difficult or unclear, the previous sentence from the text was included (nine cases). In this case, the target sentence was presented in bold letters and the instruction was to judge only the sentence in bold.

  10. 10.

    https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/WebExp/WebHome

  11. 11.

    The 12 filler items (controlled factors 9–17) featured five well-formed sentences (one not stigmatized colloquial construction (9), three unmarked sentences (10), and one generically interpretable sentence (11)) and seven not well-formed ones (two with wrong prepositions (12), one stigmatized colloquial construction (13), one with agreement error (14), one highly stigmatized colloquial construction (15), one with a semantic mismatch (16), and one with a syntactic and semantic mismatch (17)).

  12. 12.

    Not significant main effects: SYN: p > .2; DEF: p > .2. Sign. main effect: NP: F(1,47) = 113.588; p < .001. Significant interaction: SYN X NP: F(1,47) = 5.312, p = .026. The other interactions all had p > .6.

  13. 13.

    Mayer (2003a–d). I did not ask explicitly whether the participants were familiar with the stories. Judging from their reactions, however, I strongly assume that none of them were. I thank a reviewer for bringing up this point.

  14. 14.

    Raw frequency of BSs/6333 (sum of relevant NPs).

  15. 15.

    Equal variances not assumed.

  16. 16.

    If the figures presented here seem insignificant, I invite skeptics to have a look at frequency reports in the corpus study on BS + kind predicate sentences in Pires de Oliveira et al. (2010).

  17. 17.

    This is not a slight contradiction to (a), as a reviewer suspects. “Hardly visible” is a comparison with contemporary high-level automatic corpus analyses, where up to billions of words are scanned and usually many thousands of occurrences are reported in order to provide an objective measure. It also refers to the fact that there is as yet no method for automatically identifying BrP BSs, since this would mean searching for missing articles before nouns in specific semantic contexts. Cf. Wall (2013) for the many challenges a corpus study on BrP BSs has to face. Nonetheless, a collection of some hundreds of (admittedly very different) examples of course allow for first hypotheses that can be tested or for comparison with elicitation patterns from more “artificial” situations.

References

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Acknowledgments

This work was financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 833, project C3. I would like to thank Sam Featherston, Oliver Bott, Fabian Schlotterbeck, and Janina Rado for their support regarding technical implementation, statistical analysis, and much constructive feedback. Two anonymous reviewers helped to improve the paper at several critical points. I am also grateful to all the people in Brazil who made the data collection possible, with special thanks to José Simões da Silva, Célia Regina dos Santos Lopes, and Bruno Festas. The interpretation of the results as well as remaining errors are completely my responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tübingen, Sonderforschungsbereich 833, Tübingen, Germany

    Albert Wall

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  1. Albert Wall
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Correspondence to Albert Wall .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Paris Diderot University, Paris, France

    Barbara Hemforth

  2. University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Barbara Mertins

  3. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

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Wall, A. (2014). The Role of Grammaticality Judgments Within an Integral Approach to Brazilian Portuguese Bare Nominals. In: Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds) Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_6

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