Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish

Abstract

This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle (Frazier, 1978), whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/o cúmplice dos ladrões que fugiram), this study compares the behavior of Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers participating in a self-paced reading task. The data confirm that, in early phases of processing, attachment preferences are driven by a locality principle such as Late Closure. Based on a review of studies on Portuguese, Spanish and other Romance languages, we argue that the high- versus low-attachment difference across languages emerges cleanly only in off-line tasks, such as questionnaire studies, thus limiting the types of explanations for the cross-linguistic differences. We also advance an explanation for the high attachment preferences found in unspeeded questionnaire studies based on the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor, 1998a, 2002).

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Maia, M., Fernández, E., Costa, A. & Lourenço-Gomes, M., (2007) “Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish”, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 6(1), 227-250. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.151

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Marcus Maia (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ)
Eva M. Fernández (Queens College, City University of New York – CUNY)
Armanda Costa (Universidade de Lisboa, FLUL – Onset-CEL)
Maria do Carmo Lourenço-Gomes (UFRJ)

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