Discursive properties of the indefinites and bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese: a production study

Abstract

This paper investigates the referential properties of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The literature on referentiality on Spanish has claimed that indefinites, but not bare nouns, can establish and introduce new referents in the discourse. For that reason, it has been claimed that pronouns can be anaphoric to indefinites, but not to bare nouns. Only full DPs are hypothesized to be anaphoric to bare singulars (Oggiani 2011, Aguilar-Guevara 2014). In a production study I investigated whether this holds for Brazilian Portuguese. The results suggest that full DPs were the preferred anaphoric expression for both bare singulars and indefinites in Brazilian Portuguese.

Keywords

• Conhecimento compartilhado, Referencialidade, Singulares nus, Semântica.