Agradeço à minha orientadora, Profa. Maria Cecília Perroni, por toda a sua dedicação e paciência nas horas mais dificeis. Seu auxílio constante foi muito importante para a conclusão deste trabalho.Agradeço também ao Prof. Jairo Nunes pela força e otimismo que sempre me transmitiu. Desde o conselho inicial, em 1996, que me fez começar a trabalhar no quadro teórico gerativista, todas as nossas conversas foram simplesmente indispensáveis para mim! Agradeço aos professores membros de minha banca de qualificação e aos professores membros de minha banca de defesa:
This paper examines the interpretation of NPs in generic and existential contexts in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) as a third language (L3) by learners who speak English and a Romance language (Spanish, French or Italian). The paper examines whether transfer / cross-linguistic influence is from English, Spanish/French/Italian, or both, and whether it matters which language is the learners’ first language (L1) vs. their second language (L2). An Acceptability Judgment Task of NP interpretation in BrP is administered to L1-English L2-Spanish/French/Italian and L1-Spanish L2-English learners of BrP as an L3, as well as to a control group of native speakers of BrP. The findings point to a nuanced picture of transfer in L3 acquisition, in which both languages can serve as the source of transfer, but transfer from a previously learned Romance language is more pronounced than transfer from English, both for L1-English L2-Romance and L1-Spanish L2-English L3-learners of BrP.
Previous studies on the acquisition of pronouns have concentrated either on Abound or on A'-bound (resumptive) pronouns. In both cases, children performed at chance-level. In this work, I argue that the poor performance is due to a single underlying cause. This conclusion receives support from results of tests I conducted with Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children, in which the same children performed poorly with both Abound and resumptive pronouns. I follow Grodzinsky and Reinhart's (1993) claim that children's behavior is due to their limited working memory, but diverge from them in arguing that the problem resides in comparing syntactic computations, not semantic interpretations. The two analyses make different predictions for resumptive pronouns, where the interpretations for a derivation with a gap and a pronoun are the same and children still have problems.
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