The Anaphoric processing: an experiment on the solving of ambiguities in pronominal anaphora

Abstract

There are many factors that are important in the process of constructing the meaning in a text. A very important cohesive factor is the anaphoric process, that is responsible for pointing, linking and retrieving information in a text. An anaphora links old information to new information in a text. In this article, we will study the anaphoric process of pronominal anaphora cases, trying to understand how this process works in the human mind. Based on a test applied to thirty Portuguese native speakers, we were able to verify whether the anaphoric process is processed on-line, linking the anaphoric term to its nearest possible antecedent, or whether it is processed linking the anaphoric term to the topic of the sentence. In the final part of the article, we show that there are other factors that are important when we connect the anaphoric term to its antecedent in an anaphoric relation.