A contabilidade dos nomes no português brasileiro

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PARAGUASSU-MARTINS, Nize da Rocha Santos. Countability of nouns in brazilian portuguese. 2010. 142 p. Thesis (Doctorate) – Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, 2010. This thesis investigates common noun denotations in natural languages. To be more specific, it encompasses common noun denotations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Its objective is to investigate the mechanisms which licence countability in BP. Firstly, noun denotation in BP is investigated according to Borer‟s proposal (2005). The author argues that count interpretations are structurally licensed, while mass interpretations are not, thus in this sense, mass interpretations are default. According to Borer (2005), the plural morphology, in languages such as English, and the classifiers, in languages such as Chinese, are classifiers phrases which originate count interpretations with opened value nucleus div, where DIV is a division operator. The absence of these classifiers phrases bestows mass interpretation to the nouns. Contrary to most Germanic and Romance languages which permit bare plurals, but do not permit bare singulars, in BP, the bare singular is extremely productive. Thus, if Borer (2005) is right, nouns are mass-denoting in BP since they can occur without any distinctive structure, denoted amorphous mass, undivided. However, data analysis in BP opposes the predictions of Borer (2005) that a default noun denotation, regardless of being indeterminate in number, can be a mass or count denotation, and that such nouns already have this lexical denotation. Secondly, lexical denotation of count nouns in unmarked structures is investigated for countability. As Rullman and Aili You (2003) defend Chinese, BP is a language in which nouns have general number, that is, they are neither singular nor plural, they are neutral for number, as defended by Muller (2001) and Schmitt e Munn (1999, 2002). Languages with general number do not have plural morphology, but BP is an example of a language that has general number, numeral classifier and plural morpheme. Thirdly, denotation of names according to Rothstein (2007) is investigated. The author argues that countable interpretations are licensed by a mechanism of grammatical countability. According to Rothstein (2007), singular morphology in languages such as English and numeral classifiers in languages such as Chinese are grammatical operations which licence count interpretations. Since BP is a language that has general number, numeral classifiers and plural morphology, the thesis that, in this language, number and classification operations licence countability is defended.