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Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics: 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos Gramaticais
Edited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 191–212

Chapter 8
Brazilian bare nouns in quantity judgments

Kinds and atomicity

| Universidade Federal do Paraná | CNPq | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
| Universidade Federal do Paraná | Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina

The chapter reports the results of applying quantity judgment tests to bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese. The results show that the bare singular and sentences with no nouns (no cues to atomicity, as argued in Scontras et al. 2017) behave alike, in contrast with plural nouns. Brazilian bare singulars allow for cardinal and volume readings. We show that this is explained by the fact that they carry no linguistic cues to atomicity. Finally, we argue that the difference between English and Brazilian Portuguese may be explained by Chierchia’s (2010, 2014) nominal parameter: English is a predicate language, whereas Brazilian Portuguese is a kind language. The conclusion explores some consequences of this semantic parameter.

Keywords: atomicity, bare singulars, Brazilian Portuguese, kinds, quantity judgments
Article outline
  • 1.The state of the art on mass and count
  • 2.The bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 3.Two outliers in Scontras et al. (2017)
  • 4.The bare singular in BrP, another outlier?
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Design and methods
    • 4.3Description of the results
  • 5.Bare nouns in BrP and the absence of linguistic cues to atomicity
  • 6.Semantic parameters?
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.260.08oli
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