Phrase-level parallelism effect on noun phrase number agreement

Maria Marta Pereira Scherre
2001 Language Variation and Change  
M a r i a M a r t a P e r e i r a S c h e r r e Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Linguistic parallelism (i.e., the tendency of similar forms to occur together within a stretch of discourse) has been shown to be very strong in many linguistic phenomena and in a vast number of languages. Examining the role of phrase-level parallelism on noun phrase number agreement, this article demonstrates that Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese exhibit more similarities than differences with
more » ... gard to this constraint. A detailed analysis of Brazilian Portuguese data is presented, and the results are compared with those found by Poplack (1980a) for Puerto Rican Spanish. Guy's (1981a) and Labov's (1994) hypothesis about missing zeroes in Brazilian Portuguese is also discussed. In conclusion, it is claimed that the phrase-level parallelism effect on noun phrase number agreement is embedded in a universal principle of linguistic use: parallel processing.
doi:10.1017/s0954394501131042 fatcat:ubarkxc4hjgfpcwovds5bm754e