The subject/verb relationship: the masking effect of the relativizing particle

Anthony Naro & Marta Scherre

Sat. 4-5:40 B

Subject/verb agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese is a variable phenomenon. One general tendency is that when the subject/verb relationship is more obvious the verb is more likely to agree with the subject. Thus, in our data subjects explicitly realized in their own clause directly before the verb provoke more marking than subjects deleted from their clause, but present in a near-by previous clause. Furthermore, within the clause, subjects close to the verb provoke more marking than subjects separated from it by intervening material in inverse proportion to the number of syllables between the subject and the verb.

We examine the effect of relative pronouns in light of the above generalization. In a clause such as vi os meninos que chegaram 'I saw the boys who arrived', does the relative pronoun que 'who' function to remind the speaker of the subject, increasing the saliency of the subject/verb relationship and thus increasing the chances of marking, or is que another instance of intervening material that obscures this relationship and thus decreases the chances of marking?

First, we examine the effect on subject/verb agreement of the use of que with plural subjects in the spoken language. Our quantitative results show that que inhibits marking on the verb. Furthermore, we show that this effect is uniform for relative clauses with: (1) immediately preposed subjects and subjects located further from the verb, (2) full nouns and pro forms as heads, and (3) fully and partially plural marked heads.

Next, we examine the effect of que on agreement with singular subjects. In the spoken language this area of variation consists mainly of quantitative phrases of the type a maioria das pessoas 'most people'. In the written language we find more variation with phrases of the type o preço dos automóveis 'the price of automobiles'. In both cases our quantitative results show that que actually FAVORS the presence of a plural mark on the verb when the subject is singular. We obtain this same result for a text from the 15th century, where there is variation in verb marking for morphologically singular collective subjects of the type a gente de César 'Caesar's people'

Our results cover both spoken and written Portuguese. They reveal two apparently contradictory effects of the relativizing particle que: in some cases que inhibits the presence of a plural mark on the verb, while in others it favors the plural mark. The reason for these differing effects is that in the first set of contexts the subject noun that controls verbal agreement is morphologically plural, while in the second set it is singular. The correct generalization is that the relativizer obscures or masks the subject/verb relationship, so that the verb agrees with other nouns in the clause. From the point of view of both the speaker and the listener que is a structural impediment to establishing relationships within the clause. The felicitous functioning of language for the purpose of communication appears not to be served by the effect of que on agreement rules.