Título:The infuence of gender cues in pronominal antecent retrieval in Brazilian Portuguese
Orientador: Marcus Antônio Rezende Maia
Páginas: 300
Resumo
Coreference is a syntactic dependency in which pronouns are bound to previous referents in discourse. One of the keys factors influencing coreference processing is memory, since information that has already been interpreted and stored must be integrated with new material in real time. Granted that antecedents of anaphors must be retrieved from memory in coreference, the aim of this research is to provide more information on how pronominal antecedents are retrieved, and more precisely to clarify the role of gender cues in pronominal antecedent retrieval when gender morphology is overt. Since Brazilian Portuguese is a language with visible morphology, speakers of this language are used to rely on agreement cues to process language. Thus the first hypothesis of the present research is gender morphological cues play a great role in pronominal antecedent retrieval in Brazilian Portuguese. This way, structurally unacceptable antecedent candidates that agree in gender with the pronouns would be considered as potential candidates, despite the fact they violate pronominal binding constraints. The second hypothesis of the present research is memory can be influenced by language so that different gender features might assume different weights (van Dyke & McElree, 2011) in memory. This way, memory is affected by the prominence of gender features. The results of four eye-tracking experiments conducted with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese demonstrated that both binding structural constraints and gender morphological cues are equally important in antecedent retrieval in memory throughout processing. In addition, the results indicated that types of gender that are lexically determined seem to be more prominent in memory than other types of gender such as the compositional/derivational gender and the syntactic gender.