Heuristics procedures in language processing? A study on the interpretation of quantified expressions in BP

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader research that aims to evaluate the preferential interpretations - collective or distributive - attributed to expressions formed by the universal quantifiers each, all and all in Brazilian Portuguese (PB). This work contemplates a review of previous results and reports two new experiments in which we analyze the role of the previous context for the interpretation of these expressions. We discuss the experimental results in the framework of proposals according to which, during linguistic processing, the parser could be oriented by heuristic strategies and not only by strictly algorithmic / structural processes. We also analyze to what extent the depth of processing performed can be affected by the specific experimental situation - taking into account the type of task to be performed and the previous information available - and, consequently, may have reflections on the type of interpretation associated with the quantified expressions.