Prosodic Focus and Clefting in ellipsis sentences processing in Brazilian Portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Alves Fonseca, Aline
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Oliveira da Silva, Andressa Christine, Greco Carvalho, Júlia, Campos e Souza, Marcella
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: letrônica
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/letronica/article/view/44425
• topic: Processamento de frases; Elipses; Foco Prosódico; Clivagem; Sentence Processing; Ellipsis; Prosodic Focus; Clefting.

 This research investigates the influence of prosodic focus and sy­tanctic clefting in the processing of ambiguous replacive ellipsis sentences in Brazilian Portuguese, such as “In orchestral rehearsal, (it was) the violinist (who) impressed the maestro during the first song, not the soloist”. Our research was inspired by Carlson (2015) who investigated similar ellipsis sentences in English. We conducted two auditory experiments, manipulating prosody and clefting in 7 conditions. After listening to the audio, participants (N=66) read a question (“What happened in...?”) and they chose an answer: a subject interpretation response (“The soloist impressed nobody”), or an object interpretation response (“Nobody impressed the soloist”). The results indicate that both strategies of focalization (i.e., clefting and prosody) increased subject interpretation choices. When the focus cues were conflicting, the clefting structure played a decisive role in the final interpretation. Our results are aligned with Carlson (2015), which point that prosodic focus plays an important role in the ambiguity resolution (see Schafer et. al, 1996). However, as it was observed by Kiss (1998), the clefting structure conveys an exhaustive contrastive focus on the sentence, being more effective in the disambiguation process than other cues.