Abstract
This paper discusses the impact of schooling in the production of number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) by 6th graders in Rio de Janeiro. Number agreement in BP can vary between: (a) redundant, the standard variety or (b) non-redundant, non-standard forms. Such variation is influenced by speakers’ socioeconomic status (SES) and educational level (Naro, 1981; Scherre & Naro, 1998 among many others). Results of an elicited production experiment carried out with 6th graders suggest influence of SES/ type of school and academic performance in language production; the effects of schooling and metalinguistic awareness are discussed. An account of language production is presented by conciliating L1 and L2 models of speech production, considering the possibility of the coexistence of varieties in a single speaker to be akin to bilingualism.
Highlights
Abstract his paper1 discusses the impact of schooling in the production of number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) by 6th graders in Rio de Janeiro
These studies have consistently shown that socioeconomic status (SES) and,level of education affect the production of plural number agreement in BP, being the standard variety produced by highly educated speakers
His paper is divided as follows: the variable phenomenon of number agreement in BP is presented; in the third section, an account of language acquisition based on variable input is provided; the forth section reports an elicited production experiment carried out with 6th graders; the results are discussed in relation to L1 and L2 models of speech production, which are combined in an account of the language and processing abilities acquired under variable input. he impact of the present approach for language teaching is pointed out, followed by the inal remarks
Summary
BP presents variable plural number agreement, unlike European Portuguese (EP) (Brandão, 2011, 2015, 2016; Naro, 1981; Naro & Scherre, 2015; Scherre, 1978, 1991, 1994; Scherre & Naro, 1998, 2006; Vieira & Brandão, 2014). (6) Non-redundant nominal, subject-verb and predicative agreement (Scherre&Naro, 2006): que a-s coisa-ø tá car-a-ø, COMP ART.DEF.FEM-PL thing.FEM-SG be..PRS.SG expensive-FEM-SG ‘because things are expensive’. He possibility of optional number marking in all elements of an agreement relation by the determiner/prenominal elements can be viewed as grammatical. In BP, where the rule is variable, the input is diferentiated depending on the socio-economic-cultural class to which the child’s family belongs [...]” (Brandão, 2013).Considering the coexistence of diferent varieties of number agreement in BP, children exposed to variable input are faced with an acquisition challenge How would they represent variation? a procedural language acquisition model is presented in order to account for the acquisition of variation
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