The Portuguese Inflected Infinitive: an empirical approach
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Clara Vanderschueren
Clara Vanderschueren is currently active as assistant professor at the Department of Linguistics, Ghent University, Belgium. For her PhD project, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), she investigated infinitival constructions with proper subjects in Spanish and Portuguese in adverbial contexts. Other research topics include perceptive and causative constructions in Spanish and Portuguese, infinitival constructions in Galician and the use of translation corpora in linguistics.
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Kevin Diependaele
During this research,
Kevin Diependaele was working as a post-doctoral assistant at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium. He obtained his Master's degree in Experimental Psychology at the same university and his PhD degree in Linguistics from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His (psycho-)linguistic research focuses on morphology, bilingualism, vocabulary size and word frequency. More general research activities include psychophysics, mathematical psychology and data-analysis methods.
Abstract
This paper deals with the seemingly free competition between inflected and uninflected infinitives in Portuguese, a much-debated issue in Portuguese linguistics, which, however, has not been seriously empirically studied before. We specifically focus on Vesterinen's (2006, 2011) cognitive hypothesis according to which the inflected infinitive is used in cases in which the infinitival subject risks to be less cognitively accessible due to contextual reasons. We investigate this theory by analyzing both corpus and experimental (self-paced reading) data, making use of advanced linear modeling. We show that both types of analysis lead to complementary results: the inflected form primarily eases the processing of sentences with increased complexity. On the basis of these results, we argue that Vesterinen's accessibility account is but part of the solution for the inflected/non-inflected problem.
About the authors
Clara Vanderschueren is currently active as assistant professor at the Department of Linguistics, Ghent University, Belgium. For her PhD project, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), she investigated infinitival constructions with proper subjects in Spanish and Portuguese in adverbial contexts. Other research topics include perceptive and causative constructions in Spanish and Portuguese, infinitival constructions in Galician and the use of translation corpora in linguistics.
During this research, Kevin Diependaele was working as a post-doctoral assistant at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium. He obtained his Master's degree in Experimental Psychology at the same university and his PhD degree in Linguistics from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His (psycho-)linguistic research focuses on morphology, bilingualism, vocabulary size and word frequency. More general research activities include psychophysics, mathematical psychology and data-analysis methods.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Formulaicity in an agglutinating language: the case of Turkish
- A contrastive corpus-based analysis of the frequency of discourse markers in NE and NNE media discourse: Implications for a “universal discourse competence”
- Noun-Noun sequences and the complement-modifier distinction: a corpus-based study
- Formational and functional characteristics of pointing signs in a corpus of Auslan (Australian sign language): are the data sufficient to posit a grammatical class of ‘pronouns’ in Auslan?
- The Portuguese Inflected Infinitive: an empirical approach
