Título: On the processing and comprehension of temporal connectives in complex sentences
Orientador: Marcus Antonio Rezende Maia
Páginas: 208
RESUMO
This dissertation aims at investigating the processing and comprehension of temporal connectives in complex sentences, in Brazilian Portuguese. This is the first study to investigate temporal connectives such as before, after and when in the theoretical framework of Experimental Syntax in Brazil. The specific objective is to verify the reading patterns and strategy readers use to process and interpret two-clause sentences composed of those connectives. The literature has shown that linguistic factors such as clause order, connective type and the ordering of events may influence the ease of processing and comprehension of adverbial clauses. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment and two self-paced reading experiments to test the main clause hypothesis, which says the main clause is more readily available than the subordinate clause and the iconicity hypothesis, which says chronological sequence eases processing and comprehension of temporal sentences. We also verified whether the connectives antes (before) and depois (after) would present differences in the processing and comprehension of complex sentences. In addition, we tested whether processing and comprehension of the temporal terms would be facilitated in sentences with constrained events. Our results indicated that the main clause loses its privilege and the semantic relation expressed by the order of events affects both processing and comprehension. The constraints of sentences seemed to hinder processing and comprehension. Our results provide evidence in favor of the order of mention account which states that when the mapping between order of linguistic mention and the actual order of events is isomorphic processing and comprehension are facilitated.
Palavras-chave: Temporal connectives, complex sentence processing, complex sentence comprehension, order-of-mention, experimental syntax.