Abstract
This paper focuses on some properties of agreement inside the Noun Phrase, especially in what concerns adjectives and “adjectival quantifiers”, based on spoken corpora of Brazilian Portuguese and of the five African varieties of Portuguese (with special attention to the Santomean variety). We present the most salient patterns of defective agreement, focusing especially in number agreement, and contrast our findings across varieties. Results clearly differ in terms of the agreement found in the left and in the right periphery of the noun, as other studies already pointed out. The “specifiers” of the noun and pre-nominal adjectives tend to carry the plural morpheme, while the noun itself and post-nominal adjectives are defective in number marks. We put forward some possible issues for the interpretation of these data: the distinction made by speakers between the functional and the lexical domain; the relation between defective agreement on head nouns and cases of bare singular nouns which might be interpreted in these contexts as kind terms; and, finally, the fact that indefinite quantifiers may combine with these bare singulars.
Highlights
152 Matilde Miguel & Amália Mendes and Santomean Portuguese, this paper will focus on some properties of agreement inside the Noun Phrase (NP) in the above varieties, aiming to understand where the varieties spoken in Africa, as they appear in our sample2, stand and whether there are evidences for systematic and consistent occurrences of defective agreement3
The hypothesis we will put forward is that some speakers in these varieties clearly split apart the two domains inside NP: the functional domain, where grammatical number is morphologically encoded by the realization of plural morpheme [-s], and the lexical domain, lacking grammatical plural number morpheme, this pattern being more systematic and better represented in Brazilian Portuguese (BP)
In NPs with simpler structure, we noticed a substantial number of occurrences involving defective agreement, between the determiner exhibiting a plural morpheme and the Noun Head, the last one appearing unmarked for morphological plural; this is the most accounted pattern for BP; in oral productions these seem to be the most frequent kind of structures found in NPs
Summary
152 Matilde Miguel & Amália Mendes and Santomean Portuguese, this paper will focus on some properties of agreement inside the Noun Phrase (NP) in the above varieties, aiming to understand where the varieties spoken in Africa, as they appear in our sample, stand and whether there are evidences for systematic and consistent occurrences of defective agreement. Do functional and lexical items show different agreement properties inside the Noun Phrase? The hypothesis we will put forward is that some speakers in these varieties clearly split apart the two domains inside NP: the functional domain, where grammatical number is morphologically encoded by the realization of plural morpheme [-s], and the lexical domain, lacking grammatical plural number morpheme, this pattern being more systematic and better represented in BP
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