The processing of Brazilian Portuguese anaphora and the influence of dialectal variation

Abstract

The objective of this research was to investigate whether different types of recovery [se, Ø, ele(a)] may influence the coreferential processing of reflective structures, relating to these, the semantics of the verbal predicate. To verify whether the dialectal variation of the use of anaphora “se” (use, removal, and replacement) could influence the processing of these structures, we performed a self-paced reading experiment in Minas Gerais and Paraíba. The results showed a significant effect on the type of retrieval, indicating the possibility of the influence of verb type. It is believed that syntactic constraints of the Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) were activated in early stages of processing (NICOL; SWINNEY, 1989), however, the interpretability from the verbal semantics and the discursive question related to usage factors (range) meant that there was a re-examination by the parser.