Bare Singular Nouns in Portuñol and Spanish: an Experimental Approach
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Abstract
This study explores the behavior of Portuñol (spoken in the border of Uruguay and Brazil) in the nominal sphere, from an experimental perspective. Through a first semantic acceptability test, we analyze to what extent Portuñol accepts bare nouns in external argument position of episodic sentences, compared to their nominal versions with a definite article. Participants had to listen to and evaluate the degree of acceptability of sentences based on a Likert scale from 1 to 5. The second acceptability test replicates the same experiment in Uruguayan Spanish, in order to establish a comparison between these two languages. The Mann-Whitney test shows a significant difference between both conditions for both languages. Regarding the mean, the test condition in Portuñol (without article, mean = 3.7) indicates lower acceptability than the control condition (with article, mean = 4.2). However, compared to Spanish, Portuñol seems to be more flexible in the acceptance of bare nominals (test condition, mean = 2.48 and control condition, mean = 4.54). This study suggests that the grammar of Portuñol is different from Rioplatense Spanish.
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