Brazilian Bare Phrases and Referentiality: Evidences from an Experiment

Bare Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese: An experimental study on grinding

“…Under this hypothesis, if context favors a mass interpretation, the BS can be interpreted as referring to volume, like bare mass nouns. This was predicted by Pires de Oliveira & Rothstein (2011) and shown in Beviláqua & Pires De Oliveira (2014) studies. Otherwise, the BS is interpreted as referring to cardinalities, and since the BS has natural atoms, this scale is the preferred one.…”

“…Finally, to conclude, we are aware that context can bias a particular interpretation of nouns for object mass nouns, as has been shown by Grimm & Levin (2012), and for the BS in Volume contexts, as shown by Beviláqua & Pires De Oliveira (2014). In future studies we intend to manipulate the features explored here using verbal contextual cues in order to test whether this could make any difference in the results.…”

“…Otherwise, the BS is interpreted as referring to cardinalities, and since the BS has natural atoms, this scale is the preferred one. The BP cannot be interpreted by volume even in these contexts, as shown in Beviláqua & Pires De Oliveira (2014), for the reasons above. As such, while in neutral contexts, the BS and the BP behave similarly (see the results for object denoting nouns in the study presented in this paper), in contexts that bias a volume interpretation only the BS will be accepted.…”

The interpretation of Brazilian Portuguese bare singulars in neutral contexts

“…From an ontological perspective, the proposal requires the domain of individuals to be sorted: kinds have properties that are not those of plural predicates." (Beviláqua and Oliveira, 2014) If the basic kind denotation of BS nouns can support either mass or count interpretations, it must be explained why speakers tend to interpret BS nouns as a count noun in neutral contexts. This preference could be due to at least two factors that are interconnected: 1) a natural atomicity bias (nouns that denote kinds whose canonical instances are individuals more likely to be grammaticalized as a count nous and to be interpreted as referring to cardinalities in Brazilian Portuguese) and 2) lexical statistics.…”

“…The "mass view" is represented by Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein 2011. Beviláqua and Oliveira (2014) The question that matters to us in this paper is whether BSs are interpreted as number-neutral predicates or as names of kinds. Only theories according to which BS nouns are names of kinds predict that fake mass nouns may have a cardinality interpretation as well as a volume interpreta- Oliveira (2014) found out that volume interpretations are available for BS count nouns, fake mass nouns and flexible nouns (such as corda 'string' and pedra 'stone'), provided the context favors a volume interpretation.…”