syntax marcus maia . the comprehension of object anaphora in brazilian portuguese . usc . 1994 . distributed by gsil publications , usc . this thesis examines the comprehension of the empty category and the third person lexical pronoun in object position in brazilian portuguese ( bp ) . experimental results show that the processing of bp overt and nonovert objects is consistent with the leading idea underlying the overt pronoun constraint ( opc ) proposed by montalbetti ( 84 ) . experiment 1 compares the processing of overt pronouns and empty categories in object position in bp in structures in which these anaphors are a - bound by a subject and in structures in which they are a - bar-bound by a topic . results from 48 bp speakers indicate reactivation of the antecedents only by topic-bound gaps and by subject-bound overt pronouns in experiment 2 , the difference between the coreferential vs . bound readings in bp is further investigated by comparing the possibility of the strict and sloppy readings for the overt pronoun and the gap in object position . based on these experimental results , we argue for the classification of the bp null object as an instance of a null epithet , an empty r - expression with pronominal properties . the experiments are also informative with relation to several theoretical psycholinguistic issues . for more information , please contact gsil publications gsil @ scf . usc . edu south asian langs pan-asiatic linguistics : proceedings of the third international symposium on language and linguistics . chulalongkorn university , bangkok , thailand . 8-10 january 1992 . 1482 pp . ( 3 vol . ) . us $ 53 . 00 ( cloth ) including postage by airmail . the set contains 118 papers presented at the symposium . the papers deal with languages spoken in every part of asia with emphasis on southeast asian languages . areas covered are phonetics , phonology , morphology , syntax , diachronic studies , sociolinguistics , language contact , typology , neurolinguistics , psycholinguistics , and natural language processing . available from wholesale department , university bookstore , chulalongkorn university , phyathai road , bangkok 10330 , thailand . ( bank draft or international money order only . )