A interpretação deôntica no Português Brasileiro: Um estudo de natureza experimental

The aim of this paper was to analyze the interpretation of deontic modals in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) based on two types of obligation: ought-to-do and ought-to-be (Castaneda, 1970 and Feldman, 1986). In Hacquard (2006, 2010), ought-to-do and ought-to-be are interpreted in different syntactic positions: a low position, just above VP, with modal scoping over the subject; and another high, above Tense, with the modal scoping over a participant of the speech event. The low position is associated with root modalities; and high, to the ought-to-be deontic and epistemic. By means of an acceptability test with native PB speakers, we investigated Rech and Varaschin (2018b)’s intuition according to which, in a deontic sequence, the first verb is always associated with the ought-to-be interpretation. The results show that the sequence in which two modal verbs are used followed by a second sentence emphasizing the ought-to-do interpretation is judged significantly less acceptable. When only one modal is used, both the sentence emphasizing both the ought-to-do interpretation and the ought-to-be interpretation, are on average equally acceptable. We interpret this result as evidence that the deontic ought-to-be is interpreted in the left periphery of the sentence, in interaction with the discursive relations of coherence.