SEMINARI DEL CLT
Marina Sokolova (ULisboa)
“Are there pseudo-relatives in Catalan? Psycholinguistic insights into grammatical constraints”
Divendres, 14 de novembre de 2025
Horari: 15:30h
Aula 202
Abstract
This study is motivated by the unexpected Low Attachment (LA) preference observed in ambiguous relative clauses (RCs) among Catalan/Spanish–English trilinguals. Other Romance languages demonstrate a strong preference for High Attachment (HA). Grillo and Costa (2014) explain this attachment preference by the fact that Spanish, French and Italian allow a specific type of interpretation, Pseudo Relatives, following a perception matrix verb (see also Aguilar & Costa, 2021; Pozniak et al., 2019). I present a series of experiments testing the assumptions of the Pseudo Relative First Hypothesis (Grillo & Costa, 2014) in each of the languages of Catalan/Spanish-English trilinguals as well as in sentences with Spanish -> Catlan and Catalan-> English code-switching. I explain how my findings shed light on the (un)availability of pseudo-relatives in Catalan and what this reveals about multilingual sentence processing.
