Processamento correferencial da expressão “ele(a) mesmo(a)” e “ele(a) próprio(a)” em português brasileiro

Abstract

Anchored under the perspective of Experimental Psycholinguistics, more specifically in Chomsky's Binding Theory (1981, 1986), the present study analyzes how native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (PB) process the anaphora "ele(a) mesmo" and “ele(a) próprio(a)” within the structural scope of sentences. Besides this, we investigate whether the pronominal trace, present in the two anaphora, presents some late acting at the moment of the coreferential processing. We take as a base the psycholinguistic study of Oliveira, Leitão and Araújo (2013) that showed in the off-line measure in their experiment, a possible late performance of the pronominal trace contained in the anaphora "ele(a) mesmo (a)". From this, we adapt the experiment of the mentioned authors, proceeding to analyze the coreferential processing of both the anaphora "ele(a) mesmo (a)" and the anaphora "ele(a) próprio(a)", which also presents a pronominal trace, with the objective of verifying if this factor influences the anaphora coreference in PB. We also investigate the frequency of the two anaphoric expressions through interviews that compose the corpus Linguajar do Sertão Paraibano (STEIN et al., 2013), in order to find out which form is most common among PB speakers from the linguistic community of Paraíba and whether the frequency factor influences the coreference anaphora processing. Recent investigations (BADECKER e STRAUB, 2002; STURT, 2003; KENNISSON, 2003; e LEITÃO, PEIXOTO E SANTOS, 2008) have confirmed that the unavailable antecedents exert a supposed influence on the resolution of the coreference in violation of the constraints imposed by the Binding Principles A and B, defended by Chomsky (1981, 1986). In view of this, we applied two self-paced reading experiments and found from the results that in PB the expressions "ele (a) mesmo(a)" and "ele(a) próprio(a)" behave genuinely as anaphora, respecting the restrictions imposed by Principle A of the Binding Theory. Diverging from the data of Oliveira, Leitão and Araújo (2013) we did not show a late influence of the pronominal trace contained in both expressions. Regarding the frequency of anaphora, we found that this factor does not influence the coreferential processing, because although "ele (a) mesmo" is the most usual form, preferred by PB speakers in elaborating several discourses, the two anaphora behaved similarly. Therefore, the experimental results show that only available antecedents are considered in the coreferential resolution of anaphora, as Nicol and Swinney (1989) defended.