Definido fraco e definido genérico: duas faces do mesmo fenômeno? Uma investigação experimental

Abstract

For the last few years there has been a productive debate about the proper semantics ofweak definites (Beyssade and Oliveira, 2013). Carlson and Sussman (2005) proposedthat some definites, which they termed weak definites lack the uniqueness property thatis a defining property of regular definite noun phrases. In this investigation, we focus onCarlson et al. (2013) who propose that weak definites refer to events in incorporatedstructures, and mainly on Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts (2011, 2013), who propose thatweak definites in an incorporated structures are a generic DP and the noun denotes akind, which accounts for its lack of individual reference. While those authors focus onformal descriptons, the current research is an empirical investigation which was designedto evaluate the hypothesis that weak definites are interpreted as generics. We conducted acorpus analysis in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and four experiments in American English(AE), with the goal of comparing weak definite, regular definite and generic definiteinterpretations. In the corpus analysis, 2196 definite phrase occurrences were analyzed.We observed the DPs syntactic function (subject, object, adjunct) and the lexical aspect(activity, state, telic). As result, we present an interesting finding which is that, accordingto the categorization criteria employed here, weak DPs occur more than the generic ones.Another interesting finding is that the weak definites appear as subjects and that itappears as adjuncts as much as objects. The experiments were based on the idea that thegeneric hypothesis predicts that weak definites and generics should pattern together, theincorporation hypothesis predicts that they all should pattern differently from each other.We constructed 54 sentences with an event or activity verbal phrase, 18 of which had anobject that could have a weak, generic or regular interpretation. Experiment 1 used asentence judgement in which 90 MTurkers would evaluate if the nouns in the sentencescould be judge as an individual or a category, and weak definites were more similar toregular definites, as individual, and generics as category. Experiment 2 used a forced choicetask, with replication in BP, and generic definites show a significant preference for a newnoun continuation, which differs from weak. In experiment 3, we ran a free completiontask, and the proportion of continuations with the repetition of the target word wereless frequent on the weak condition, because they are incorporated. Experiment 4 used aforced completion task, and the bare plural form was only used in the generic condition.We argue that all results support that generic definites present a different pattern fromweak ones, constituting a category of definite noun phrases.