Coerção e subespecificação: nomes nus no inglês e no português brasileiro

Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics of bare nouns in English and Brazilian Portuguese, analyzing the results of experiments in the count-mass domain in both languages. Specifically, it examines the results for English (Frisson; Frazier, 2005) and for Brazilian Portuguese (Lima, 2019; Lopes, 2024; Cardozo, 2024). In English, bare singulars are coerced into mass in mass contexts, and mass nouns are packed into units in count contexts (Frisson; Frazier, 2005). Thus, in English, nouns enter into the semantic derivation with the information that it is either mass or count. The experiments in Brazilian Portuguese show that this is not so in this language. Lima (2019) did not find any additional processing cost from mass to count nor from count to mass, pointing towards polysemy. Lopes (2024) found additional processing for bare singulars in count contexts with numerals but no additional processing with measure phrases. Cardozo (2024) only found additional processing for plural quantifiers combined with pluralized mass nouns. All of them refute the hypothesis that the bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese behaves like a count noun (against Schmitt; Munn, 1999), since, in all experiments, it is compatible with mass contexts. Thus, the bare singular in English does not carry the same grammatical ingredients as the bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese. It is still an open question whether the bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese is underspecified (Pires de Oliveira, 2022) or a mass noun (Pires de Oliveira; Rothstein, 2011). Keywords: Coercion. Bare nouns. Count-mass. Brazilian Portuguese. English.