THE PARTIAL PRODUCTIVITY OF GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTIONS
AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE CLAUSAL COMPLEMENTATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47456/cl.v14i28.31280Keywords:
Clausal complementation, Semantic knowledge, Entrenchment, Statistical preemptionAbstract
How do speakers retreat from overgeneralization? In Usage-Based Construction Grammar, three answers have been offered: (i) speakers rely on general grammatical knowledge; (ii) speakers rely on item-based statistical knowledged in terms of entrenchment; (iii) speakers rely on item-based statistical knowledge in terms of preemption. In order to probe into the psychological validity of these explanations, this paper focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese Clausal Complementation Construction (e.g. “Ela disse que estava bem” ‘She said that she was fine’). After a corpus-based analysis, from which we derive three specific hypothesis concerning the representation of the underlying constructional network, an elicited production experiment was carried out where subjects were asked to watch short videos and answer intepretive questions. The results suggest that grammatical (semantic) knowledge and entrenchment play an important role in the retreat from overgeneralization; on the other hand, no evidence was found to support statistical preemption.
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