Definiteness of Body Part Terms in Spanish and Portuguese

The uniqueness effects in definite noun phrases have been the subject of much debate (Heim 1983, Kadmon 1990, Roberts 2003, Szabó 2000). Some claim uniqueness is part of the semantics of the definite article, while others derive it pragmatically. Both sides assume that the uniqueness condition is binary, and so the only thing that matters is whether the number of equally salient candidates is one or more. In this paper I examine the usage of the definite article with body part terms in a number of constructions in Spanish and Portuguese. I check how the cardinality of the body parts affects the choice of the article used with the body part terms. The obtained data are important for evaluation of the different theories of definiteness. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 contains the survey of the previous literature. Section 3 contains the presentation of the discussed phenomena with the Spanish data, and Section 4 is devoted to Brazilian Portuguese. The results are summarized and their importance for the theories of definiteness is explained in Section 5. Section 6 addresses the question of appraising the size of the corpus accessible to a search engine. Section 7 contains the conclusions and suggestions for further research.