When Grammar Meets Pragmatics: Subject Preference and Coherence Relations in Brazilian Portuguese Pronoun Interpretation

Abstract

Although pronominal reference is a common device in language, there is much debate about how we use contextual and structural cues to process pronouns. The main goal of the present study was to set a completion experiment following Rohde’s (2008) work to test how pragmatic and grammatical cues interact during pronoun interpretation. Our motivation was to use Brazilian Portuguese as the target language, as its pronominal system is known to differ from English, which could give rise to cross-linguistic differences in pronoun interpretation. Forty-eight participants wrote continuations for incomplete passages to verify whether verbal aspect, verb semantics and coherence relations elicited the same pattern of pronoun interpretation as reported in Rohde (2008). Overall, our findings support an expectation-driven model, in which pronoun interpretation is the result of both structural and pragmatic cues. We conclude that cross-linguistic differences can be accounted by such model, and that structural cues have a more prominent role in causing these differences, while pragmatic-driven expectations would exert the same influence on pronoun interpretation across languages.