Subject-object asymmetries in the processing of European Portuguese cleft structures: Assessing the role of animacy

Xinyi Li; Maria Lobo; Joana Teixeira

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.482

Subject-object asymmetries in the processing of European Portuguese cleft structures

Assessing the role of animacy

Authors

Xinyi Li Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Maria Lobo Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Joana Teixeira Universidade Nova de Lisboa

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Abstract

This study investigates the intervention effects on the processing of standard clefts by adult speakers of European Portuguese, focusing on the semantic feature of animacy. Using a self-paced reading task combined with a picture selection task, we manipulated the extraction types (subject vs. object) and the animacy of the clefted constituent (animate vs. inanimate). 40 participants took part in the study. We observed a processing and comprehension advantage for subject clefts over object clefts, regardless of animacy. There is also an advantage of the intersection of the animacy feature in object clefts, demonstrated by shortened reading times from the verb phrase onward. No effects of animacy on the assignment of thematic roles were found: the prototypical association of animacy with the subject did not significantly influence processing. Our results suggest that features relevant to the syntactic component such as the +N feature (shared by the object and the subject in all clefts) trigger stronger intervention effects than features that do not affect this component. It is thus plausible that different theoretical perspectives on intervention effects (featural Relativized Minimality and similarity-based interference models) complement each other, predicting that morphosyntactic features trigger stronger effects than semantic features.

Keywords

intervention effects, animacy, cleft, European Portuguese, sentence parsing

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Author Biographies

Xinyi Li, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

PhD candidate at the Linguistics Department of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities and researcher in the Linguistics Research Centre of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Maria Lobo, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Associate Professor (with Habilitation) at the Linguistics Department of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities and researcher in the Linguistics Research Centre of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Joana Teixeira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics of the Department of Linguistics of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities and researcher in the Linguistics Research Centre of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.