Bare singulars and relative measures in Brazilian Portuguese

Bare Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese

Against the Nominal Mapping Parameter : Bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese

Chierchia 1998 proposes that languages vary in terms of what they allow their NPs to denote. This variation is encoded in a semantic parameter which determines whether NPs denote names of kinds (and are therefore argumental) [+arg, -pred], predicates (and therefore require a determiner to be in an argument position) [-arg, +pred] or either [+arg, +pred]. In this paper we argue using data from b...

Norwegian Bare Singulars: a Note on Types and Sorts

The distribution of bare singulars in Norwegian was thoroughly examined in Borthen (2003). The present paper outlines an account of these data in a type-logical semantics of the Neo-Carlsonian kind. The focus is primarily on the syntax-semantics interface, which here, somewhat simplified, amounts to assigning semantic types in the appropriate sortal domain to bare singulars. I argue that bare s...

Relative clause processing in Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

This dissertation considers ambiguity resolution in regard to two issues. First, it investigates factors that lead the human parser to favour some types of interpretations over others when faced with some types of ambiguous input. Second it examines the reanalysis process that takes place when initial biases lead to incorrect interpretations. The first part of the dissertation (Chapter 1) propo...

Bare Nominals, Morphosyntax, and the Nominal Mapping Parameter

The Nominal Mapping Parameter (Chierchia 1998) has been proposed as a semantic parameter to account for the cross-linguistic distribution of bare nominals. We examine specific predictions that the NMP makes with respect to the bare singular arguments and bare singular predicates. Brazilian Portuguese allows bare singulars in argument position while English and other Romance languages doe not. F...