Acceso usuarios
Ronan Pereira
, Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino
Low não, a novel negative construction in Brazilian Portuguese, is infrequent in corpus analyses, raising the question of whether it represents a fully licensed but rare variant or reflects an emerging pattern whose grammatical status is not yet stable across speakers. This study evaluates speakers’ acceptability judgments and reaction times using a speeded acceptability judgment task to test predictions from generative approaches and usage-based accounts. Results from 37 participants show that low não is consistently rated lower than canonical não, yet higher than ungrammatical distractors. Reaction times are comparable to ungrammatical distractors, suggesting increased evaluation effort. The data also reveal substantial interspeaker variability across both acceptability and processing measures. The combination of intermediate acceptability, longer reaction times, and structured variability observed in this study is compatible with both generative and usage-based accounts but is more parsimoniously captured by usage-based approaches in which differences in experience and entrenchment give rise to graded variation in acceptability and processing dynamics. Overall, these results illustrate how experimental methods can provide insight into both synchronic distribution of novel constructions and the mechanisms that may underlie syntactic change, while highlighting the importance of modelling acceptability and processing as partially dissociable dimensions of linguistic evaluation.
