Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T08:28:06.468Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Marking in discourse: “Birds of a feather”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Maria Marta Pereira Scherre and
Anthony J. Naro
Maria Marta Pereira Scherre
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Anthony J. Naro
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Subject/verb agreement and subject/predicate adjective agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese are subject to a parallel processing effect, such that marking leads to further marking and lack of marking leads to further lack of marking. For example, semantically plural verb tokens preceded by marked plural subjects in the same clause or other marked verb tokens with the same subject in the preceding discourse are more likely to be explicitly marked for plural than similar tokens preceded by unmarked subjects or verbs. This phenomenon is in direct contradiction to the principle of linguistic economy, since marking tends to occur precisely in those contexts in which it is most highly redundant and could therefore be discarded with no loss of information. Furthermore, the marking of successive plural tokens cannot be considered statistically independent events, since the outcome of previous marking decisions effects future marking. We propose that the parallel processing principle is a universal of language use.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 1991, pp. 23 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Guy, Gregory R. (1981). Linguistic variation in Brazilian Portuguese: Aspects of the phonology, syntax, and language history. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Haiman, John. (1983). Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59(4):781–819.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lemle, Miriam & Naro, Anthony J. (1977). Competências básicas do português. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Movimento Brasileiro de Alfabetização.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony J. (1981). The social and structural dimensions of a syntactic change. Language 57(1):63–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naro, Anthony J. et al. (1986). Relatório final de pesquisa: Projeto Subsídios do Projeto “Censo” à Educação. Rio de Janeiro: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (1988). VARBRUL programs. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (1980). The notion of the plural in Puerto Rico Spanish: Competing constraints on /s/ deletion. In Labov, William (ed.), Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic. 55–67.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David. (1988). Variable rules. In Ammon, Ulrich, Dittmar, Norbert & Mattheir, Klaus J. (eds.). Sociolinguistics. New York: Walter de Gruyter. 984–987.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David & Laberge, Suzanne. (1978). Statistical dependence among successive occurrences of a variable in discourse. In Sankoff, David (ed.), Linguistic variation: Models and methods. New York: Academic. 119–126.Google Scholar
Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira. (1988). Reanálise da concordância nominal em português. Ph.D. dissertation, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.Google Scholar
Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira. (1989). A concordância de número nos predicativos e nos particípios passivos: mais um caso de paralelismo formal. Anais do XXXVI Seminário de Lingüística do Crupo de Estudos Lingüísticos do Estado de São Paulo, Lorena. 576–585.Google Scholar