The processing of non-redundant agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a phenomenon under variation, as pointed out by the sociolinguistic literature and it can be produced with standard pattern (As meninas brincam), with all the related items being marked for plural, or with non-standard pattern, with the plural marker being omitted only in the verb (1- Os meninos brincaØ) or in the verb and in the name (2 – As meninaØ brincaØ). In this article, we propose to review these different possibilities of production of the non-redundant pattern in the literature and to analyze data obtained from an experiment of elicited production by repetition task. Besides that, we examined the role of phonic salience in the alternation between the patterns. The results suggest that the speakers modify the pattern produced in (2), exhibiting the plural marker also in the name and omitting only in the verb, as in (1), which may explain the fact that we did not find a significant difference between the processing of redundant and non-redundant pattern (2). However, some methodological issues might be responsible for this result. Furthermore, phonic salience was not a significant factor with regard to the alternation in the production of the two patterns investigated.