Bare nominals and number in brazilian portuguese

The chapter bears on the distribution and interpretation of bare nominals in Brazilian Portuguese, paying special attention to bare singulars and the number neutrality that seems to characterize them. Brazilian Portuguese displays overt plural morphology and a full range of definite and indefinite determiners, which makes the relatively free distribution of bare singulars an intriguing topic from a typological perspective. The chapter discusses some proposals and analytical tools that have been employed to account for their behaviour, as well as their theoretic implications for issues related to singular–plural, mass–count, and generic–episodic distinctions.

Definiteness, Uniqueness, and Maximality in Languages With and Without Articles

We present a number of experiments testing influential hypotheses about the meaning of definite descriptions (in languages with articles, represented here by German) and bare nominals (in articleless languages, represented here by Russian). Our results are in line with the commonly entertained hypothesis that definite descriptions convey uniqueness (if singular) or maximality (if plural), but fail to support two hypotheses about bare nominal interpretation, namely that singular bare nominals convey uniqueness ( Dayal 2004) and that topical bare nominals convey uniqueness/maximality ( Geist 2010, among many others). Uniqueness or maximality inferences are expected to arise via covert type-shifting under these approaches. Our results are compatible with what we take to be the null hypothesis, namely that bare nominals in articleless languages are existential and free of presuppositional semantics, even if they correspond—in their use—to definite descriptions ( Heim 2011).

The syntax of number marking: the view from bare nouns in Wolof

Several languages allow for their nominals to occur without any functional morphology; they are dubbed ‘bare nominals’. BNs are often number-neutral, i.e.,there is no commitment to a singular or plural interpretation. In Wolof, however, BNs are singular when unmodified. A plural interpretation becomes available only when a nominal-internal plural feature is exponed in the form of complementizer or possessum agreement. I propose an extension of Béjar & Rezac’s (2009) Person Licensing Condition to number: a marked number feature (i.e. plural) must be licensed by Agree. BNs in Wolof can in principle be singular or plural. In the absence of a nominal-internal probe that Agrees with the plural feature of the BN, the Number Licensing Condition is violated, causing the derivation to crash. Unmarked number, i.e., singular, does not obey the NLC, so the derivation converges, yielding a singular BN. However, if there is a nominal-internal number probe, which is realized as complementizer or possessum agreement, the NLC is satisfied, allowing a derivation to converge where the BN is plural. If correct, this analysis accounts for the unusual behavior of BNs in Wolof and provides further empirical support for the view that valued features are responsible for nominal licensing (Kalin, 2017, 2019).

Mandarin associative plural -men and NPs with -men

This paper discusses the syntax and semantics of -men and four types of phrases containing -men in Mandarin. I defend the view that -men should be analyzed as a plural morpheme as first argued in Li (1999) but argue against the analysis of positing -men in the D position or treating it as a definite determiner. It will be shown that definiteness is not inherent to -men and that -men is compatible with numerals and classifiers and should be in a position local to nouns. I propose an analysis of -men as an associative plural and explain the properties of the four types of expressions containing -men within a Neocarlsonian account of bare nominals. The formal account of the syntax and semantics of phrases containing -men advanced in this paper shows that it is not necessary to assume a functional category D that is always invisible in the grammar of Mandarin in order to account for the behaviors of its nominal arguments and argues for the lack of DP projections in Mandarin.

Bare Nominals

Bare nominals (also called “bare nouns”) are nominal structures without an overt article or other determiner. The distinction between a bare noun and a noun that is part of a larger nominal structure must be made in context: Milk is a bare nominal in I bought milk, but not in I bought the milk. Bare nouns have a limited distribution: In subject or object position, English allows bare mass nouns and bare plurals, but not bare singular count nouns (*I bought table). Bare singular count nouns only appear in special configurations, such as coordination (I bought table and chairs for £182). From a semantic perspective, it is noteworthy that bare nouns achieve reference without the support of a determiner. A full noun phrase like the cookies refers to the maximal sum of cookies in the context, because of the definite article the. English bare plurals have two main interpretations: In generic sentences they refer to the kind (Cookies are sweet), in episodic sentences they refer to some exemplars of the kind (Cookies are in the cabinet). Bare nouns typically take narrow scope with respect to other scope-bearing operators like negation. The typology of bare nouns reveals substantial variation, and bare nouns in languages other than English may have different distributions and meanings. But genericity and narrow scope are recurring features in the cross-linguistic study of bare nominals.

A Case of V2 in Chinese

As far as the left periphery is concerned, there is a conspiracy between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to ensure the success of sentence formation. We would like to put forth the claim that peripheral features play an important role in this endeavor, which can be checked by either Merge or Move according to the parameter-settings of individual languages. Along this line, topic prominence can be regarded as the result of peripheral feature checking, and the null topic hypothesis à la Huang (1984) is reinvented as a null operator merger to fulfill interface economy in the left periphery. In this regard, Chinese provides substantial evidence from obligatory topicalization in outer affectives, evaluatives, and refutory wh-constructions, which applies only when the licensing from a D(efiniteness)-operator is blocked. The idea also extends naturally to the issues concerning pro-drop and bare nominals in general. In this light, we may well compare Chinese obligatory topicalization to those residual cases of verb-second (V2) in English, all being manifestation of the strong uniformity.