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Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing pp 209–224Cite as

Processing Coercion in Brazilian Portuguese: Grinding Objects and Packaging Substances

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 48))

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the interpretation of mass to count and count to mass coercion in Brazilian Portuguese. One interesting feature of Brazilian Portuguese (as opposed to other dialects of Portuguese and other Romance languages) is the productive use of bare singulars in argument position (that is, count nouns that are not preceded by a determiner as in Eu comprei livro ‘I bought book(s)’). The goal of this paper is twofold. The first goal is to explore the interpretation of bare singulars. In a reading time task, I investigated whether the grinding interpretation of bare singulars (João viu camisa rasgada no chão ‘João saw (a/some) shirt(s) torn on the floor’) is costlier than a non-grinding interpretation (João viu camisa dobrada no chão ‘João saw shirt folded on the floor’). This is predicted by rule-based lexical shifts hypotheses according to which the non-grinding interpretation is the basic interpretation and the grinding interpretation is derived from it. The second goal is to investigate whether mass nouns in count contexts (packaging) such as Eu comprei três cervejas ontem ‘I bought three beers yesterday’ are costlier than count nouns in the same syntactic environment (Eu comprei três laranjas ontem ‘I bought three oranges yesterday’). In both studies, no significant effect was found when contrasting coerced and non-coerced uses of count and mass nouns. I suggest that this provides supporting evidence in favor of lexical pragmatics approaches over lexical rule-based theories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Frisson (2009) for an overview of the processing of polysemy literature in contrast with the literature on processing homonyms and Brocher, Foraker, and Koenig (2016) for an overview of the literature on different types of polysemy.

  2. 2.

    Quantity judgment tasks (cf. Barner & Snedeker, 2005) have shown that a few flexible nouns in English (such as chocolate, paper) can be used as bare nouns (who has more chocolate?) as well as in their pluralized form (who has more chocolates?). These studies have shown that flexible bare nouns will allow a volume interpretation (that is, when replying the first question, a speaker would say that the person who has more chocolate is the one that has a large piece of chocolate, not the person that has several small pieces).

  3. 3.

    The motivation to test grinding comes from Frisson and Frazier’s (2005) eye-tracking experiment 2 on grinding in English, but the design and materials of our experiment differ from that Frisson and Frazier. See Sect. 4 for more details.

  4. 4.

    To the best of my knowledge, there is one corpus (www.corpusdoportugues.org) that provides word frequency counts for words in Portuguese, but this corpus includes in the frequency count not only data from Brazilian Portuguese, but from other dialects as well (European Portuguese; Mozambican Portuguese; Angolanean Portuguese). According to this corpus, the nouns used in the present study have mid-frequency (frequency range: 501–3000, 42%) with the exception of sangue ‘blood’ and carro ‘car’ which are high frequency words (>3000).

  5. 5.

    A search of the nouns being used in the study in the corpus do português (www.corpusdoportugues.org) that is not restricted to Brazilian Portuguese (cf. footnote 4) has shown that out of all the pluralized mass nouns tested (cervejas ‘beers’; molhos ‘sauces’; vinhos ‘wines’; aveias ‘oatmeal(s)’; vinagres ‘vinegars’; farinhas ‘flours’; madeiras ‘woods’; presuntos ‘ham(s)’; ouros ‘gold(s)’; manteigas ‘butter(s)’; iogurtes ‘yogurt(s)’) only the ones in bold present low frequency in the corpus. In the non-pluralized form, all nouns present mid-frequency (501-3000) to high frequency (>3000).

  6. 6.

    Bare singulars do not occur as subjects of episodic sentences in Brazilian Portuguese. Bare singulars in subject position are available only in generic sentences. For a review of this discussion see Menuzzi, Silva, and Doetjes (2015).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Cristiane Oliveira (for technical support and for her help in the process of running this experiment) and Steven Frisson and Lyn Frazier, for the inspiration for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Suzi Lima

  2. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Suzi Lima

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  1. Suzi Lima
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Correspondence to Suzi Lima .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA

    Katy Carlson

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Charles Clifton, Jr.

  3. Linguistics Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA

    Janet Dean Fodor

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Lima, S. (2019). Processing Coercion in Brazilian Portuguese: Grinding Objects and Packaging Substances. In: Carlson, K., Clifton, Jr., C., Fodor, J. (eds) Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_11

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