Costa, A. 1 & Maia, M. 2
1 Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa
2 Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
The present research aims to evaluate the processing costs’ of unaccusative constructions like (2) against typical transitive ones as (1) by Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese speakers . These sentences illustrate the causative alternation that has been studied in the linguistic field (Keyser & Roeper 1984, Burzio 1986, Levin e Rappapport-Hovart 1995, Di Sciullo 2005).
In terms of processing, we assume that (2) entails more cognitive effort than (1) because it is a derived structure whose verbal internal argument moves to the subject position.
(1) The cooker melted the butter.
(2) The butter melted.
In Portuguese, the causative alternation is encoded morphologically by means of an ergative clitic –SE, as in (5). However it is possible to have no morphological marking, as in (6), what is frequent in BP, and occasional in EP.
In this study, through a self-paced reading task, we collected temporal data that allows us to evaluate the reading times of typical transitive constructions like (3), the baseline condition, against less typical ones, as in (4) given the non-animate subject, and unaccusative conditions, with and without the reflexive clitic, (5) and (6).
(3) Num dia de Verão |a cozinheira derreteu a manteiga | e depois juntou a farinha.
In a summer day the cooker melted the butter and after she added the flour.
(4) |o calor derreteu a manteiga |e esta estragou-se
the heat melted the butter and it blew up.
(5) |a manteiga derreteu-se |
the butter melted –clitic SE
(6) |a manteiga derreteu |
The reading time of the critical segment, the second one, will allow us to infer about processing costs. Taking into account the results of Di Sciullo et al. 2007; Maia et al. 2009, we predict that the syntactic complexity of the unaccusative constructions will request more reading time, and more when there is no morphological marking.