The interplay between grammatical and pragmatic information

Dr. Mahayana Laboratório de Estudos Experimentais em Linguagem (LEELin), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

The interplay between grammatical and pragmatic information in the interpretation of ambiguous overt pronouns 

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This talk presents how pragmatic and grammatical information interact while establishing the reference of ambiguous overt pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese. We show how Kehler et al.'s (2008) expectation-based model can explain cross-linguistic data by modulating the relations between pronoun production and pronoun interpretation through Bayes’ Rule. Our empirical data come from a sentence-completion task and support the claim that there are different biases underlying pronoun interpretation and pronoun production. Furthermore, we argue that pragmatic information would play a homogenous role cross-linguistically, and differences in the patterns of ambiguous pronouns interpretation may be explained by by grammatical factors that influence pronoun production.