Textual contributions to the resolution of conceptual anaphora

• Grant number: 12/05108-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2012
• End date: May 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Psycholinguistics
• Principal Investigator: Edson Françozo
• Grantee: Mahayana Cristina Godoy
• Supervisor: Colin Phillips
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Maryland, College Park, United States

Abstract

Work on pronoun resolution has shown that pronouns elicit of a set of possible antecedents that seem to be limited to referents that could grammatically be antecedents (Clifton et al. 1997). However, the occurence of plural pronoun "they" in conceptual anaphoras posits interesting questions, since the pronoun reference depends on a singular noun phrase such as "the army division" in "The army division was vaccinated. They soon departed". In a previous work (Godoy, 2010), we investigated if semantic and pragmatic information provided by predicates could immediately override the violation of the syntatic number agreement. Our main finding was that after collective contexts (e.g. "the army division was reorganized") the pronoun reading time was greater than in those contexts with a predicate that distributed the predication to the members of the group (e.g. "the army division was vaccinated). Although we could find evidence of the importance of semantic cues for the resolution of this specific case of plural pronoun anaphora, we still cannot assure if the reported effects are due to a prediction process - one that could immediately use top-down mechanisms to anticipate semantic features or lexical itens - or if they are just the result of the ease of an integrative process. Our main objective is finding an experimental paradigm that allows us to separate what would be the influence of a prediction mechanism from what would be the result of an integrative facilitation, and by answering this question we hope to contribute to the current debate about the role of prediction on language comprehension. (AU)