ACCESSIBILITY OF RELATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS AND WRITING ACQUISITION

Abstract

The relative clause plays a special role in linguistic typology, in which features the pioneer Keenan and Comrie's work (1977), which postulate an Accessibility Hierarchy (AH) to deal with the morphosyntactics conditions applied to the relative construction. Nevertheless, this work is considered one of the most important studies in literature about linguistics universals, with an extensive coverage, according as the universal conditions involved in AH operate as principals which constrain the variation of the relatives in any particular language.This work aims at investigate the relative clauses in the process of writing acquisition in Brazilian Portuguese, in order to corroborate or not the hypothesis of that the acquisition of this construction is ruled by Kennan and Comrie's AH (1977), based in a direct relation between acquisition and ease in cognitive processing. Thereby, having as methodological support evidences discussed by Kato (1981) and Perroni (2001), this work propose a similar investigation of the relative clause accessibility to syntactic functions, applied, however, to writing acquisition.Agreeing with Kenedy (2007) that standard relative constructions in prepositional positions are antinatural, we consider as hypothesis that this alternative is acquired by children only in a situation of formal literacy at school, when their contact with standard language is enlarged. Furthermore, we consider as hypothesis that the constructions which relativize the higher positions in AH (Subject and Direct Object), together with alternatives copiadora (pronoun-retention) and cortadora (gap) of lower positions (Indirect Object, Oblique and Genitive), must be more easily acquired, even in formal literacy.