Anaphoric Encapsulation Relations from an Experimental Perspective
doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.56.1.4
Keywords:
Anaphoric encapsulation; coreference; experimental pragmatics; procedural meaning; eye-trackingAbstract
This article examines the cognitive processing of anaphoric encapsulation in Spanish from an experimental pragmatics perspective. Based on previously available experimental eye-tracking data, it analyzes three factors that affect the processing of these relations: the predicative or non-predicative nature of the recovered antecedent, the informational load of the referential expression, and the grammatical form (nominal or pronominal) that activates the relation. The results show that nominal encapsulation does not require greater overall processing effort than coreference, that the decisive variable for explaining local processing effort at the referential expression is not the type of anaphoric relation, but the categorizing, generalizing and recategorizing function of the noun phrase in relation to the antecedent, and that pronominal encapsulations, activated by neuter pronouns, constitute mechanisms that require lower local effort than encapsulations activated by definite noun phrases. Taken together, the results reveal that the grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties of anaphoric expressions constrain processing locally, while discourse progression gives rise to operations that integrate these local efforts into a relevant relational representation. In this way, the predictions of Accessibility Theory, which accounts for patterns of local processing effort, can be reconciled with the Informational Load Hypothesis, which explains how referential expressions behave in broader contexts and how their characteristics affect the global processing effort of the utterance.
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