The semantics of bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Teresina – PI

Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics of bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) variety spoken in Teresina. In order to explain the behavior of bare nouns in natural languages, Chierchia (1998) proposes a nominal parameter. In his proposal, languages are divided in three types: (i) there are languages with bare nouns occurring freely as arguments, with no number morphology (bare singulars); (ii) there are languages with bare nouns occurring only in restricted contexts, always with number morphology (bare plurals); (iii) and for some languages only mass nouns appear as bare singulars, while count nouns appear as bare plurals. There is a consensus in the literature on the fact that BP data indicates the need of reformulating Chierchia’s proposal, since both singular and plural bare nouns occur freely as an argument in such a language. The aim of this paper is to look into the BP spoken in Teresina (PI), discussing the distribution of bare nouns in argumental positions, as well as their denotation, and finding out their possible interpretations. In order to achieve our goal, we have performed corpus-based research. Our analysis was concentrated on the PORFATER corpus. Regarding the distribution of bare nouns, we found out that they only occur freely in complement position, showing generic readings as well as existential readings. We also did not find kind denotations for bare nouns at all. Such a picture leads to the conclusion that bare nouns in the BP variety spoken in Teresina behave like indefinites in Heim’s 1982 view. The bare nouns in the examined corpus do not denote kinds. We also claim that whenever they seem to be in subject position they are actually a sentential topic, as in Müller (2004).