A influência dos antecedentes disponíveis e não-disponíveis da anáfora “ele(a) mesmo(a)” em português brasileiro (PB)

Abstract

In this article, we investigated the processing of coreferential relations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to understand how this process develops in the human mind. The goal was to investigate how Principle A and Principle B of the Binding Theory (CHOMSKY, 1986) operate in the interpretation of coreferential anaphoric elements in sentences with reflexive pronouns. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we replicated an experiment carried out by Oliveira et al. (2012), which investigated the influence of available and unavailable antecedents in the processing of the anaphoric element “a si mesmo(a).” In the present experiment, we only replaced the anaphoric word “a si” by “ele(a).” The goal was to investigate if the processing of the first element will be affected by Principle B or A. In the first case, if the pronoun “ele” is be bound to an antecedent out of the anaphora’s scope; in the second case, if the domain or if the following segment “mesmo(a)” is processed, there would be a reassessment of the initial decision from the interpretative process that forces application of Principle A. The results corroborate Nicol and Swinney’s (1989) study, and Oliveira, Leitao and Henrique’s (2012) study about Brazilian Portuguese. In both studies, the anaphora was related to the antecedent, i.e., the nearest element in relation to the Binding Theory.