AN INVESTIGATION ON THE ROLE OF REFERENTIALITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

Abstract This paper presents an off-line experiment we conducted to investigate the influence of referentiality on relative clause (RC) interpretation in Brazilian Portuguese. RCs associated with complex NPs seem to be preferentially attached to a referential noun. This referentiality effect can be treated in discourse terms (Gilboy, Sopena, Clifton & Frazier, 1995) or in syntactic-semantic terms (Bezerra, 2017; this paper). Our questionnaire tested these approaches using two types of complex NPs (occupational and kinship NPs) and the results showed that the syntactic-semantic structure of the...

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