INDEFINITENESS AND GENERICITY: BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF UNDER-REPRESENTED LANGUAGES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5212/xr42w827Abstract
This article presents the results of Dayal’s questionnaire (forthcoming) for Brazilian (Br), one of the eight languages involved in the project “(In)definiteness and genericity from the perspective of underrepresented languages” (Pires de Oliveira 2022). The data are primary and original. The article investigates the behavior of the indefinite, the bare singular, and the bare plural. The results show that they do not have the same distribution nor the same interpretation. There are types of indefiniteness: the bare singular denotes species, the bare plural is sum, and the indefinite is quantification. Br is not the only Romance language to accept the bare singular; Portuñol does. Rioplatense Spanish does not have bare nominals. From this perspective, English is an exotic language because it only accepts the bare plural. Bare languages show that (in)definiteness is not a morphological universal and raises questions about the logical form of the noun phrase.
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