Acceptability and production of preposition stranding in relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese

comparing BP speakers and BP English students

Abstract

This study investigates an innovative structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP): relative clauses with preposition stranding. BP speakers and Brazilian undergraduate Portuguese-English bilingual students participated in an acceptability judgement task with a 5-point Likert scale and an elicited production task. Since relative clauses with preposition stranding is a very frequent construction in English, bilinguals were expected to show higher levels of acceptability and production of this kind of structure in BP. However, this phenomenon seems to be lexically restricted in BP: there are prepositions which may be stranded, but there are others which may not, according to Marcelino (2007) and Salles (2003). Our results show that bilinguals do indeed accept preposition stranding in higher levels than BP monolinguals, but their production is similar to that of BP speakers, conditioned by type of preposition, that is, they are only more tolerant with relative clauses with preposition stranding in BP in acceptability tasks. These results also show that these constructions are well-accepted and naturally produced by native BP speakers. The comparison between BP speakers and undergraduate Portuguese-English bilingual students suggests that the presence of similar structures in the additional language may increase acceptability rates of innovative variants in the mother tongue.