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Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese: more on the DP/NP analysis

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Abstract

In this paper we claim that Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese come in two shapes. Real BNs, by which we mean bare count nouns not specified for number and definiteness, correspond to NPs that can only occur as objects of a reduced class of predicates (namely, those that express a have-relation) and are interpreted as property-type expressions. Other BNs can be definite and, although not morphophonologically specified for number, they are DPs with null Determiners morphosyntactically specified for Number features and are interpreted as entity-type expressions. We base our analysis on the distribution and meaning of BNs, by comparing BrP with other Romance languages, mainly (Old and Modern) French on the one hand, and Spanish and Catalan on the other.

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Notes

  1. Labov (1975) considers the alternation between different forms—standard and vernacular—a case of inherent variation, in the sense that this type of variation is due to the intrinsic properties of the linguistic system/dialect/variety itself, rather than to an irregular mixture of dialects.

  2. These are the basic types of verbs within the sort of syntactic theory of argument structure developed by Hale and Keyser (2002) and Mateu (2002).

  3. There are at least two cases where the definite article is not optional in BrP. Preceding proper names in vocative constructions, it is obligatorily absent (Longobardi 1994; see Espinal 2013 for similar facts in Catalan). In combination with predicates that are usually said to require kind-referring objects (e.g., inventar ‘to invent’), it is obligatorily present. Consider (i) from Borik et al. (2012).

    1. (i)
      figure e

    See Beyssade (2005) for the proposal that objects of verbs like inventer ‘to invent’ in French refer to concepts/prototypes, which are different from kinds. We leave this topic for further research.

  4. It has been pointed out in the literature that BrP has lost third person clitics (Cyrino 1997), which were replaced either by a null object or a full pronoun ele. We follow Galves (2001) and Kato (2002) for whom BrP third person pronouns in object position are different from clitics in other Romance languages.

    Syntactically, third person pronouns are not strongly deficient as this term was defined by Cardinaletti and Starke (1999) and, accordingly, they may or they may not be adjacent to the verb, they can occur in coordinate structures when [+animate], and they may refer to a [−animate] antecedent. Semantically, third person pronouns cannot have a proposition/predicate as antecedent in the way clitics can.

  5. See also Menuzzi (1994).

  6. For bare plurals in BrP, we assume the traditional proposal that a null determiner is required for argumenthood in Romance (Longobardi 1994; Chierchia 1998):

    1. (i)
      figure l

    Bare plurals in other Romance languages, such as Catalan and Spanish, might be also claimed to have null determiners. On the other hand, French des and Italian dei/degli/delle, which precede what look like a bare plural in other Romance languages, are indefinite articles for which a complex determiner structure has been postulated (Gross 1967; Kayne 1977; Ihsane 2012), one that encodes plural semantics (Farkas 2006).

  7. See von Heusinger (2011) for an overview of different approaches to definiteness.

  8. Notice that the BNs in italics in (12) and (13) could both be preceded by an overt definite article, as was the case in examples (6) and (7) above in the text.

  9. Additional attested examples of the unique atomic reference for postverbal BNs in object position are found in the online version of the magazine Almanaque Brasil. One such example is given in (i) where the BN aliança can only refer in the discourse to the object antecedent a minha aliança ‘my ring’ and to the DP seu anel de casamento ‘his wedding ring’.

    1. (i)
      figure p
  10. Similar examples are given by Mathieu (2009:126 (9)), who argues that Old French BNs can also be interpreted as definites.

    1. (i)
      figure r
  11. We acknowledge that there exists a well-established analysis of D-genericity (cf. Krifka et al. 1995) according to which nominal expressions that refer to kinds of individuals take the form of bare plurals, and more exceptionally of definite generics (cf. the ‘well-established’ kind restriction, Carlson 1977; but see Dayal 2004 for a criticism). For English, this neocarlsonian approach seems to account appropriately for the meaning of bare plurals in generic sentences and, in fact, it has deeply influenced most of the literature on kind reference in other languages (e.g., Chierchia 1998; Longobardi 2001, 2005; Zamparelli 2002, for Italian; and Schmitt 1996; Dobrovie-Sorin and Pires de Oliveira 2008, for Brazilian Portuguese, among others).

    Our goal in this paper is to show that in BrP D is the category that is required for argumenthood and that this category encodes reference by specifying Number. Therefore, a bare plural in BrP cannot have kind reference by itself. We follow previous work by Borik and Espinal (2012, 2014, to appear) that shows that: (a) kind-referring nominal expressions are not uniform in their morphosyntactic appearance across languages; (b) definite kind terms, which we understand to denote abstract intensional entities, constitute the default way to refer to kinds in Romance (namely Spanish), since definite kinds do not refer to any instantiation of the kind due to the absence of Number; and (c) generic plural definites cannot arguably be assumed to be equivalent in meaning to bare plurals in English. This approach is in accordance with the well-known observations that bare plurals in Romance cannot obtain a kind reading, but only an existential one (cf. Laca 1990, 1999; Longobardi 1994, 2001; Dobrovie-Sorin and Laca 1996, 2003; Beyssade 2005; de Swart 2006), and that, by contrast, definite plurals are used in Romance to render a logically equivalent kind interpretation.

  12. We assume that the indefinite reading of postverbal BNs also involves a null D (see also footnote 7). Note, however, that we are not going to study this indefinite reading in this paper.

  13. See Krámský (1972) and Harris (1977, 1980) for an account of the obligatory insertion of determiners in Romance linked to the change in agreement morphology (e.g., from the noun in Old French to the determiner in Modern French). Mathieu (2009) proposes a minimalist account of the obligatory insertion of determiners in Modern French.

    See more recently Dobrovie-Sorin (2012) for the claim that the features of Number do not project a syntactic category, and for the postulation of a parameter: in Romance, a Num feature attaches to D, whereas in English it attaches to little n.

    See also Sauerland (2003) for the proposal that semantically contentful number is not interpreted on the Noun but in a syntactic category above the Determiner.

  14. See Bouchard (2002) for additional sets of differences that follow from the fact that Number is realized on D in French (but on N in English).

  15. We remind the reader that agreement on N is subject to variation. Thus, one could also find in BrP: os conta-gotas. Besides the form given in the main text, a formal variant of the compound N is: o conta-gotas.

  16. We hereby refer exclusively to Num features, because we argue that determiners are the constituents capable of satisfying the [uNum] feature of the N. No mention will be made to other φ-features. See Picallo (2008) for the relationship between Gender and Number.

  17. We are not convinced by the arguments given by Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (2011) that aim to show that the class of have-predicates is larger in Greek than in Spanish and Catalan, because the data this author provides include secondary predications, weak definites, and verbs of consumption whose objects have massified readings, for all of which a syntactic structure larger than NP should be postulated (Espinal and Mateu 2011).

  18. See Suñer (1982), Kallulli (1999), Espinal and Mateu (2011) for discussion of a structural constraint on subjects/specifiers, namely that they must be properly licensed by appropriate functional categories.

  19. In relation to the semantics of pronouns, with a special reference to Japanese, see Tomioka (2003).

  20. We think that some data discrepancies that have been raised to us by native speaker reviewers are due to the NP/DP structure that can be attributed to BN objects of have-predicates.

  21. As pointed out by Espinal and McNally (2011) the possibility of alternation between the Catalan property-type anaphora en ‘one’ and the entity type anaphora el ‘it’ does not necessarily imply that there is any direct anaphoric relation between the clitic el and the supposed BN antecedent. Consider the contrast in (i).

    1. (i)
      figure v

    The two pronouns seem to require different discourse rhetorical structures. The first sentence of each discourse introduces a BN that does not identify a discourse topic, it simply describes a specific having-relation. In the second sentence of each discourse we find a verb that in both cases also denotes a have-relation, either tenir ‘to have’ or portar ‘to wear’. So, where is the difference? The clitic en ‘one’ in (ia) refers back to the antecedent property denoted by the Noun mòbil, but cannot introduce a discourse reference to a particular mobile. By contrast, the third person accusative clitic el ‘it’ is licensed in the second discourse because it identifies a new discourse topic; for this possibility to arise the locative prepositional complements a la butxaca plays a crucial role. In other words, the third person accusative clitic is licensed as a result of accommodating information to the common ground at the time of utterance understanding, a process which increases the identifiability of a unique token referent by both speaker and hearer.

    It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the accommodation approach any further. We refer the reader to the following references on this topic: Lewis (1979), von Fintel (2000), Simons (2003), Beaver and Zeevat (2007), among others.

  22. Additional support for the correlations presented here comes from the study in Casagrande (2010). Her results, although not conclusive, show that a third person weak pronoun, as opposed to the null object, is rejected by native speakers in sentences where the antecedent of the pronoun/null object is a BN in complement position of a have-predicate. It should be pointed out that the author did not rely on the classification of verbal predicates that we have presented in this section, but the sort of data she obtained supports our account of the data.

  23. See note 22.

  24. In contrast to (22a), a reviewer has suggested to us the example in (i). We attribute the well-formedness of this example to the structural ambiguity that can be associated with objects of have-predicates: the object complement of a have-predicate can be a DP, in addition to an NP (cf. Espinal and Mateu’s 2011 generalization).

    1. (i)
      figure ab
  25. At this point the interpretation we are interested in for the preverbal BNs exemplified in (25) should be contrasted with the definite generic kind interpretation, which correlates with the pronominal form ele. An additional example of this correspondence has been given to us by one of the reviewers:

    1. (i)
      figure af

    See also Ionin et al. (2011) for an empirical investigation of NP interpretation in English, Spanish, and BrP in generic contexts. We postpone the discussion of preverbal BNs to Sect. 5.

  26. For a technical implementation within minimalist terms of the notion of SHARE, see Ouali (2008).

  27. The main characteristic of Inverse Agree is that “the goal may have an uninterpretable feature checked against a higher probe” (Zeijlstra 2012:491). A technical definition of Inverse/Reverse Agree is provided by Zeijlstra (2012:514):

    1. (i)
      figure ar

    The operation of Inverse/Reverse Agree is further supported by the mechanics of Delayed Valuation (Carstens 2013), which guarantees that an unvalued feature with no match in its c-command domain can be valued either ex situ (by raising to c-command a matching feature in a higher phase) or in situ (by a matching feature within the same phase). We thank S. Tubau (p.c.) for this comment.

  28. We tend to think that this analysis, proposed for BrP, is the right one for French as well, but a thorough study of other Romance languages considered in this paper, namely Catalan and Spanish, awaits further research. On the one hand, in these languages Number is obligatorily specified both on the Determiner and on the Noun, but, on the other hand, these languages share with French and BrP a significant number of the properties described by Bouchard (2002).

  29. The present proposal follows closely the analysis of Negative Concord proposed by Biberauer and Zeijlstra (2012). An alternative analysis would be to follow the proposal by Tortora (2009, 2012) and Blanchette (2012, 2013) based on the notion of Feature Spreading.

  30. It is interesting to relate this claim to Ghomeshi’s (2003) analysis of plural nouns in Persian. She accounts for the fact that plural nouns in this language are construed also as definite, unless an overt marker of indefiniteness appears, and she postulates that nouns are contained within DP/QP structures with null Ds.

  31. The Naked Noun Constraint was originally proposed for Spanish (Suñer 1982), and presumably it applies to other Romance languages like Catalan, Italian, and European Portuguese, which are languages that do not allow BNs in preverbal position unless they are modified, coordinated, or focused, and, at the same time, are languages which allow the VS order (cf. Contreras 1986, 1996). Since BrP does not allow VS order (this being only possible with unnaccusative verbs), one could think that the Naked Noun Constraint might not apply to this language.

  32. The avoidance of indefinites is a tendency, not an absolute, as already pointed out by Kuroda (1972:167): “If one were to make a judgment according to which one assigns a certain attribute expressed by the predicate to the subject, he would in fact be assigning this property to an arbitrary individual entity that might be named by the particular attribute used to refer to it.” It is possible to express categorical judgements where the subject is a non-specific indefinite expression. See, for example, (41c) in the text.

  33. In this way, we differ from Britto, who follows Figueiredo-Silva (1996) in that in BrP the null form of the pronoun only occurs in expletive and quasi-argument uses.

  34. In contrast to those categorical judgments in (41) and (42), it is important to point out that BNs in BrP may also occur in preverbal position of thetic judgments. In that case they occur in subject position (Britto 2000), as proved by the fact that: (a) a resumptive pronoun is not possible, and (b) they have an existential interpretation, not a generic one. For these BNs we assume that they are DPs, internal arguments, first moved to a preverbal [Spec, IP] subject position, and later semantically reconstructed within the VP in order to guarantee their existential interpretation. Interestingly, it should be noticed that primary stress is on V (ia) or on a constituent within the VP (ib). We use the symbol ˈ to mark the syllable with primary stress.

    1. (i)
      figure aw

    As pointed out by one of the reviewers, these examples are parallel to left dislocations associated with an existential interpretation in other Romance languages:

    1. (ii)
      figure ax
  35. We assume the well-established distinction between three types of predicates: k(ind)-level, i(ndividual)-level and s(tage)-level (cf. Carlson 1977; Condoravdi 1992b; Kratzer 1989, 1995).

  36. As we will see, this free variation is only possible for generic interpretations of the BN, and it is neither possible for the deictic interpretation of the definite determiner, nor for the existential interpretation of the indefinite determiner (Condoravdi 1994).

  37. A reviewer has raised the question of how our analysis of preverbal BNs, as denoting maximal sums in intensional domains, can be made compatible with the well-known claim that definite plurals are underspecified with respect to the level of granularity (distributivity) and exhaustivity (maximality). As discussed by Malamud (2012), and references therein (Link 1983; Landman 1989; Schwarzschild 1991; Brisson 1998), the variation in collective/distributive and maximal/non-maximal interpretations is dependent on the semantics of the predicate, and also on pragmatic factors such as the speakers’ estimates on each other’s beliefs, and the participants’ goals on the computation of truth conditions, from which the optimal selection of entities within the NP denotation is driven.

  38. See de Swart (2006) for an alternative analysis of French generic sentences with definite plurals. In her analysis a bijection one-to-one relationship stands between the atomic members of two intensionally defined sets of individuals considered at the group level.

    1. (i)
      figure bi
  39. We thank O. Borik (p.c.) for making this comment to us.

  40. See Müller (2004) for an analysis of this type of BNs as NPs in Topic position. We do not follow this analysis because, as argued in Sects. 2 and 4, preverbal BNs are not NPs; they are DPs specified for Number.

  41. As pointed out by one of the reviewers, it might be the case that these two readings should not be kept apart, because in both of them several factors as contrastiveness, topichood, intonation/stress, seem to intervene at the time of composing their meaning. We do not commit ourselves with this unification at this point.

  42. We thank L. McNally (p.c.) for making this comment to us.

  43. A reviewer points out that it is not impossible for a definite kind term to appear as the subject of a stage-level predicate as, for example, in The pig arrived in North American in 1600. However, in this example the pig does not seem to refer to a kind term, but to a prototypical representative of a kind. See Krifka et al. (1995), Dayal (2004), Borik and Espinal (2014, to appear), among others, for discussion on this issue.

  44. The question that remains to be answered is why this preverbal BN cannot have a definite singular interpretation as the one that can be attributed to the definite description in (68a). The overt determiner seems to be responsible for this reading, but we leave this issue for further research since this might be related to more general phenomena of natural languages.

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Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this study were presented at the following international conferences: 9th CSSP (Paris, 2011), 42th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Southern Utah University, 2012), 6th NEREUS Workshop (Köln, 2012), 6th Romania Nova (Natal, 2013), and 39th Incontro di Grammatica Generativa (Modena-Reggio Emilia, 2013). We also presented part of this work as a seminar at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, 2012), at the University of Hamburg (Hamburg, 2012), and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Bellaterra, 2013). We would like to thank the audiences of all these conferences and seminars, as well as the anonymous reviewers for all their suggestions and comments. We specially thank Olga Borik, Jordi Fortuny, Susagna Tubau, Xavier Villalba, and the editor of NLLT for most helpful remarks and observations.

This research has been funded by the following research grants: Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FFI1011-23356), Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR-1073, ICREA Acadèmia award), Brazilian CNPQ-Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (research grant 303006/2009-9), FAEPEX-UNICAMP, FAPESP-Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (research grant 2012/06078-9) and CAPES-Spanish Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deportes (research grants CAPES/DGU-305/13 and 0214. 2013-2014).

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Cyrino, S., Espinal, M.T. Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese: more on the DP/NP analysis. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33, 471–521 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9264-6

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