A aquisição de construções clivadas do português brasileiro

Abstract

The central aim of this thesis is to understand how children having Brazilian Portuguese as their mother tongue acquire different types of cleft structures. Cleft constructions (in its larger sense) consist of resources for focusing constituents in the sentence, and are subdivided into clefts and pseudoclefts. While the former consist of a cleft constituent, a copula and the complementizer que, the latter display a wh-pronoun instead of the complementizer. The justification for conducting this research stems from the paucity of studies on the acquisition of cleft structures in varieties of Portuguese, despite the existence of studies on clefts about the stable grammar of Brazilian Portuguese. To this end, an experiment was conducted that analyzed the oral production of three groups of children in the process of acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese as a mother tongue, besides a control group made up of adults. In addition to it, we have analyzed a children's corpus, the Corpus Infantil Longitudinal, which includes data of clefts uttered by a child interacting with his mother or grandmother. Elements with the syntactic function of subject, in the adult and child groups, were more frequently clefted, in comparison with the functions of direct object, indirect object and adverbial adjunct. The most used cleft constructions adults were pseudoclefts in the syntactic function of subject, while children used truncated clefts more often. After having presented the theoretical framework on which this thesis is based, we include a literature review on clefting, its relation with the notion ‘focus’ and the main types of clefts and pseudoclefts in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. The analysis of the results of both the experiment and the corpus showed that the analyzed children produce various types of cleft constructions and no pseudocleft construction, a construction type which is, however, produced by adults. Besides, canonical clefts without the complementizer were exclusively found in the children's answers, while simple fragments, which can be considered ellipted forms, appeared in significant numbers in speech of children and, to a small extent, in those of adults. Specifically, the data from the experiment shows that, at first, children produce more cleft structures than adults, but this is only the case when simple fragments are counted as responses. In both adult and children groups, elements with the syntactic function of subject were those most frequently clefted if compared to direct objects, indirect objects and adverbial adjuncts. The cleft constructions most used by adults were pseudoclefts in subject function, whereas children have mostly used truncated clefts Although they have clefted all syntactic functions surveyed, there was again a prevalence of those in subject function.