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| Author(s): |
Mahayana Cristina Godoy
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem |
| Defense date: | 2010-02-25 |
| Examining board members: |
Edson Françozo;
Mónica Zoppi Fontana;
Renato Miguel Basso
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| Advisor: | Edson Françozo |
| Abstract | |
Conceptual anaphora resolution brings interesting questions to research in psycholinguistics, for it provides the possibility of investigating how a plural pronoun can be solved from a singular antecedent, as one can see in "The army division was vaccinated. They went to Africa". According to Landman (1989), groups such as "the army division" can have a plural denotation when it receives a distributive predicate (e.g., was vaccinated), but it can also have a singular denotation when its predicate is a collective one (e.g., was reorganized). In other words, while the predicate selects the plurality of members that compose the army division in the first case, in the second one the same army division is predicated as an institution, i.e., as a singular entity. From these considerations, it is reasonable to assume that collective or distributive readings determined by the predicate can influence pronoun resolution, if one consider anaphora resolution as a product of the expectations generated by the readers about which referents are more likely to be mentioned in subsequent text (Kehler et al., 2007). In order to test this hypothesis, we ran two experiments. In the first one, we investigated whether collective or distributive readings of expressions similar to "the army division" would create expectations on how subjects provide continuations for passive sentences. The participants should complete sentences such as "In order to go abroad, the army division was vaccinated" with their agents. The result indicates that the continuation given to collective predicates was preferably a singular agent, while the continuations provided to distributive predicates tended to be plural agents. In a second experiment, subjects read sentences with conceptual anaphoras whose antecedent was predicated in a collective or distributive way. The pronoun reading time in these two situations was compared, showing a significant longer time when the pronoun followed collective predication. Therefore, both results corroborate our hypothesis, indicating that the way groups are predicated can generate expectations that influence conceptual anaphora resolution (AU) | |