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.

中文翻译：

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当语法遇上语用：巴西葡萄牙语代词解释中的主题偏好和连贯关系

尽管代词指称是语言中的一种常见手段，但关于如何使用上下文和结构线索来处理代词，仍有许多争议。本研究的主要目的是在Rohde（2008）的工作之后进行完成实验，以测试在代词解释过程中语用和语法提示如何相互作用。我们的动机是使用巴西葡萄牙语作为目标语言，因为众所周知它的代词系统不同于英语，这可能导致代词解释的跨语言差异。四十八名参与者写下了不完整段落的续篇，以验证言语方面，动词语义和连贯关系是否引起了罗德（2008）报道的相同的代词解释模式。总体而言，我们的发现支持期望驱动模型，其中代词的解释是结构和语用暗示的结果。我们得出的结论是，这种模型可以解释跨语言的差异，并且结构线索在引起这些差异方面具有更重要的作用，而语用驱动的期望会对跨语言的代词解释产生相同的影响。