Processing of subjects in sentences with unaccusative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This is a study about the optionality observed in the placement of syntactic objects of unaccusative monoargumental verbs in Portuguese. These verbs allow for both pre-verbal or post-verbal subjects in this language. We sought to investigate the hypothesis that such grammatical optionality may diverge from what is observed in sentence processing, therefore creating a separation of the two grammatically possible constructions at the level of their inplementation as linguistic performance. Our investigation was based upon a psycholiguistic experiment for which we employed a type of task that allows for very precise localization of processing events leading to higher processing costs: the maze task. Our results provide evidence that post-verbal syntactic subjects in sentences with uaccusative verbs yield systematically less costly sentence processing for speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.