Os verbos modais poder, ter que e dever na aquisição do português brasileiro: dados longitudinais e experimentais

Abstract

This dissertation performs an investigation regarding the use of the modal verbs poder, ter que and dever in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese, having the general goal of verifying the moment in which the child uses each one of these verbs and which are their possible interpretations. The theoretical framework of “Generative Grammar”, developed by Noam Chomsky (1959 and subsequent), that follows an innatist perspective on the acquisition of language, is adopted. The main focus of this study is the acquisition of language’s implicit knowledge by speakers, a classical question for this framework. For modality, a formal perspective is adopted, approximating it to the old logic, through the concepts of “possible” and “necessary”. To Gomes and Mendes (2018), modalized sentences communicate information about the state of things that could or should exist, formally captured through possible worlds. By exploring the modal verbs in the context of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), Kratzer’s analysis (1991, 2012) has been applied to evaluate the complexity of modality. Besides, we will present an analysis of modals according to the syntax-semantics interface, interpreting Kratzer’s proposal by Hacquard (2006) from the syntactic structure defended by Cinque (1999), who proposes different heads to the epistemic and root modalities, establishing a connection for the access to contextual information in distinct moments of the syntactic derivation. Therefore, in this research, a longitudinal study is adopted with a child accompanied by the age of 1;11 to 5;0 years, investigating when and in which contexts the modal verbs poder, ter que and dever are used, as well as an experimental study with 6-7 year-olds, with the goal of verifying if they have similar preferences as adults do for the use of ter que and dever for root interpretation (which concerns permission, obligation, necessity, desire and condition in regards to the individual’s inherent factors) and epistemic interpretation (which indicates possibility and necessity with evidence base), compared to Pessotto (2015), who found a striking preference of dever for the epistemic interpretation in a study with adults. Regarding the acquisition of modal verbs by children in BP, we have as reference the work of Lunguinho (2014), who conducted the first formal research about the acquisition of modals in BP, indicating that there is a pattern of development, compared to other languages, in respect to the appearance of root modal data preceding the epistemic modals. Our data confirms Lunguinho’s findings (2014) largely. Regarding the experimental test applied to 6–7-year-old children and a control group of adults, it was observed that adults present distinct behaviors in the epistemic and root contexts, as previously evidenced by Pessotto (2015): the preference for dever in the epistemic context is evident, whereas in the root context, there is a larger use of ter que, but not in so high proportions. As for the children, they did not show a distinct behavior between contexts, even though the percentage of dever in the epistemic context was a little higher than the use of ter que in the root context, which would indicate a tendency towards the adult’s direction, although not with statistical significance yet, suggesting that the weaker force of dever is still not fully acquired