Good Things Come in Threes

Let's do a quick thought experiment! Imagine that a certain word is claimed to be very statistically frequent in a language, which means that people use it very often when they speak and write. When asked whether said word is acceptable in their language, people also say that it sounds much better than its infrequent counterpart. Now when you take them to a laboratory setting to measure how they read those words in context, which form would you expect to be easier from a psycholinguistic perspective? The one that's more recurrent in the lexicon and judged to be better by the speakers, right? Well, at least in Brazilian Portuguese, that's actually complicated!

In this project, I conducted a self-paced reading experiment, an acceptability judgement survey and a corpus study to examine the use of null and overt pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which has arguably been shifting towards the latter. Suprisingly, native speakers read sentences with overt pronouns more slowly despite rating them more acceptable than those containing null pronouns. (Yes, I normalized the data to account for differences in sentence length.) The corpus analysis, in turn, confirmed that BP is changing, but also that null subjects are not yet infrequent, especially in academic writings. I argued that these results reflected a “pronoun avoidance strategy” in BP related to its transitory state, and proposed a new view that integrated both processing and usage-based elements to account for language change.