English Title: Encapsulating and Coreferential Anaphoric Relations in Discourse Construction: An Experimental Approach to Cognitive Processing

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Abstract

This doctoral dissertation investigates how speakers construct and organize discourse through referential mechanisms, focusing specifically on anaphoric encapsulation and coreference. These two procedures differ in the nature of the antecedent they retrieve, yet they share fundamental cognitive principles. Drawing on a pragmatic perspective and an experimental online reading study using eye tracking, the dissertation examines how these mechanisms establish referential relations, what processing effort they require, and what theoretical and applied implications they present. The study is structured around three central research questions: (i) whether the nature of the antecedent—predicative or non-predicative—affects the processing of anaphoric relations; (ii) whether the lexical or pronominal nature of the anaphoric expression modulates processing effort; and (iii) whether the amount of conceptual information encoded—categorizing or recategorizing mechanisms—determines significant differences in cognitive processing. From these questions, three hypotheses follow: (i) encapsulation does not require greater processing effort than coreference; (ii) pronominal expressions do not generate greater effort than nominal expressions; and (iii) recategorizing expressions require greater effort than categorizing ones. The experimental findings show that: i. The nature of the antecedent is not a decisive factor in the processing of encapsulation and coreference, despite their theoretical differences. ii. The grammatical nature of the anaphoric expression does influence processing, since nominal and pronominal forms differ in whether they encode conceptual or procedural information. iii. Informational load is the key determinant in the processing of anaphoric relations: expressions introducing new information into the discourse—recategorizing—require greater effort than those that retrieve information already stored in working memory—categorizing. The main results have applications in several domains and, in this dissertation, are extended to the field of translation. A functional guide based on dynamic translation techniques is proposed to help translators manage anaphoric relations efficiently. Based on the empirical results, nine main conclusions are formulated, confirming the three hypotheses and synthesizing the behavior of encapsulation and coreference as discursive anaphoric mechanisms whose complexity depends primarily on the type and amount of conceptual information they encode. This cognitively grounded, experimentally supported characterization complements previous theoretical-descriptive accounts and offers a unified framework for understanding these mechanisms in Spanish linguistics.