Efeitos sintáticos e temáticos na resolução de pronomes ambíguos em Português Brasileiro

Abstract

This article reports an experimental study on the type of information used by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese during ambiguous overt pronoun processing. In contexts that depict Transfer of Possession events (Rodrigo served the cake to Caio), previous studies in Brazilian Portuguese have reported that ambiguous pronoun interpretation is mainly driven by information about the thematic-role of the pronoun’s antecedent, with no influence of the antecedent’s syntactic position. However, the experimental stimuli used in these studies contained an overlap of thematic role and syntactic information. We carried out a sentence completion experiment to investigate the extent to which speakers of Brazilian Portuguese rely only on thematic information to interpret ambiguous pronouns in contexts of Transfer of Possession. Our data suggests that, differently from other languages, syntactic information of the previous clause does not change the probabilities associated to preferences in overt pronoun interpretation. Once again, speakers of Brazilian Portuguese were mainly influenced by the antecedent’s thematic role. We discuss how these results fit a probabilistic model of pronoun processing.