Perception and evaluation of relative clauses

a pilot study

Abstract

With the present study, we investigated how Brazilian speakers/readers perceive and evaluate different relativization strategies in writing. We start from the understanding that evaluation is one of the problems involving the theory of linguistic variation and change (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 1968) and from some studies on perception, evaluation, beliefs and attitudes about variable phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese (FREITAG, 2016; OUSHIRO, 2015a). We developed a questionnaire with five sentences, three of which contained different relativization strategies. The evaluations indicate that the relative with cujo (whose) is more consciously perceived by respondents: it received the highest number of evaluations as beautiful and associated with more educated people, however, on the other hand, it received less evaluations associating it to likeable people. The evaluations of the resumptive pronoun and PP-chopping variants were more neutral and indicate that these variants are already incorporated into Brazilian Portuguese vernacular, the former, including, to written language. We concluded that PP-chopping and resumptive pronoun variants are not salient enough to be perceived, being evaluated, in general, neutrally. The variant with cujo seemed to be more salient, as it depends on schooling to be learned and is considered beautiful, associated with more formal contexts and to educated people.