Deontic interpretation in brazilian portuguese: an experimental study

• Autor(a) principal: Rech, Núbia Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Soares, Eduardo Correa, Guesser, Simone
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.416
• topic: Modality; Deontics; Ought-to-do; Ought-to-be; Experimentation; Brazilian Portuguese; Modalidade; Deônticos; Ought-to-do; Ought-to-be; Experimentação; Português brasileiro

The aim of this paper isto analyze the interpretation of deontic modals in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) based on two types of obligation: ought-to-do and ought-to-be (Castañeda, 1970; Feldman, 1986). In Hacquard (2006, 2010), interpretations ought-to-do and ought-to-be are associated to different syntactic positions: a low position, just above VP, with the modal verb oriented to the subject; and another high, above Tense, with the modal oriented to a participant of the speech event. The low position is associated with root modalities; and high, to the ought-to-be deontic and epistemic. By means of an acceptability test with native BP speakers, we investigated Rech and Varaschin’s (2018b) intuition according to which, in a deontic sequence, the first verb is always associated with the ought-to-be interpretation. The results show that the sequence in which two modal verbs are used followed by a second sentence emphasizing the ought-to-do interpretation is judged significantly less acceptable. When only one modal is used, the sentence emphasizing both ought-to-do and ought-to-be readings is on average equally acceptable. We interpret this result as evidence that the deontic ought-to-be is interpreted in the left periphery of the sentence, in interaction with the discursive relations of coherence.