O processamento da correferência catafórica pronominal pessoal em português brasileiro

Abstract

The research that comprises this Master's Dissertation, in the scope of Psycholinguistics and Generative Linguistics, deals with the processing of cataphoric coreference in Brazilian Portuguese (PB) performed by personal pronouns of third person (he/she) in the gramatical function of subject within the nominative case position. It consists of empirical research of na on-line nature developed through the experimental methodology through which the technique of self-paced reading was chosen as a methodological paradigm. An experiment following this method was used in this study in order to understand how this kind of PB coreference is carried out psycholinguistically, trying to show some of the procedural properties present in the coreference of the cataphora inherent to Brazilian Portuguese. It was tried to verify if the Predictive Mechanism of Active Dependence Formation, henceforth PMADF, and consequently if the Active Search Mechanism (ASM) – vastly observed in another type of long-distance dependency, filler-gap dependencies, and in the cataphoric coreference more recently studied in other languages – is also operative in PB. It has also been sought to find out if such a prospective scanning mechanism is restricted to structurally lawful syntactic positions that are not shielded by Principle C of Binding Theory (CHOMSKY, 1981) and whether the morphological information characterized from the phi (f) features of gender interferes or influences the performance of this restriction. The results of the experimente surprisingly pointed to the fact that there is no PMADF operative in PB to the extent that the evidence does not support the operation of the ASM nor according to the model that advocates its establishment through the formation of a strong active dependency, based on highly predictive and top-down procedure of strongly dynamic and diligent search, in the midst of which the coreferential relationship is established immediately without waiting for unambiguous bottom-up evidence of the poscedent as originally proposed by Kazanina (2005) and Kazanina et. al. (2007) nor according to the one that proposes its establishment through the formation of a weak active dependency, based on a search not so active, although still predictive and top-down, due to being more based on the bottom-up computation of the linguistic input as proposed by Van Gompel and Liversedge (2003). The experiment also showed that gender morphological information is used before the establishment of the cataphoric coreferential relationship as suggested by Cowart and Cairns (1987) in such a way that the processing of the cataphoric coreference proceeds only from the visualization and processing of the cataphoric pronoun and of the noun phrase taken as potential poscedent based on bottom-up information. In addition, the data show that the establishment of the coreference is sensitive to the structural block of Principle C in PB as shown in other languages and that the performance of this syntactic constraint is both influenced and modeled by the gender phi (f) features. Finally, it is concluded with the inquiry that the human parser, at least in PB, constitutes and processes the cataphoric coreference through bottom-up processes that are accurate and grammatically restricted in morphosyntactic terms.