Against the Nominal Mapping Parameter : Bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BrP) that this kind of parameterisation is both conceptually and empirically problematic. Brazilian Portuguese, like English, but unlike most of the other Romance languages, allows bare plurals and mass nouns in argument position. However, unlike English, BrP also allows singular count nouns to appear bare in argument positions. This is illustrated in (1). We will call these simply bare singulars.
منابع مشابه
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...
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