Brazilian and English bare nouns: Language variation, experiments, and L2s

Abstract

This paper proposes to connect research areas with the aim of understanding bare nominals across languages. It focuses on Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) and English. The BrP nominal system challenges the parametric models in Chierchia (1998a, 2010), and two proposals have been raised to explain it within Chierchia’s model: the Bare Singular (BS) is a plural count noun (Schmitt and Munn 1999, 2002; Müller 2002) or it is mass (Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein 2011). Experimental research (Bevilaqua 2019) does not support either of these theories because BrP speakers oscillate between mass and count when interpreting the BS. In contrast, BSs are ungrammatical in English and speakers massify them; they are never counted. Motivated by the experimental studies, Pires de Oliveira (2020, 2021, to appear) presents a new approach: although BrP and English are number marking languages (Chierchia 2010, 2015), atomicity, a grammatical operation (Rothstein 2010, 2017), is activated at different points in the derivation. In English, the first nominal layer projects atomicity, while in BrP, the determiner carries this information; thus, plural inflection is optional on the noun. This paper suggests that language processing and second language acquisition are areas of investigation that may provide new evidence for a better understanding of the semantics of noun phrases.