Nominais nus no português brasileiro: as particularidades do singular nu

Abstract

Natural languages present distinct properties that can be classified into three types: [+arg, -pred], [-arg, +pred] and [+arg, + pred] (CHIERCHIA, 1998). These properties are related to the different occurrences of nouns in languages. The aim of this study is to verify the particularities of the occurrence of bare singular in Brazilian Portuguese, because it occurs quite differently from other languages with the same semantic properties. Still, there seems to be a similarity between English and Brazilian Portuguese in relation to the bare plural, however such similarity, as in the languages of the same type, does not occur in the bare singular. Pires de Oliveira (2012) and Müller (2004) present relevant studies that aim to understand these particularities, raising themselves the following hypotheses: (i) bare singular is similar to the mass noun and (ii) bare singular as sentential topic. Even so, according to Müller (2002), BP presents questions of generic readings that are captured in the other Romance languages, partially corroborating the semantic parameters of natural languages.