Abstract
Comparatives in Brazilian Portuguese show that Bale and Barner's (2009) generalizations do not hold cross-linguistically; this leads to reconsidering the role of cardinality in mass and count syntax. The paper discusses contrasts in the use of naturally atomic, or object, mass nouns in Brazilian Portuguese and English. Brazilian Portuguese has a productive bare singular, which is analysed, following Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein (2011) as an object mass noun with a count counterpart. However, in comparative constructions it does not behave as Bale and Barner predict. We give an account of the relation between counting and measuring which explains the data and we show, using data from Hungarian, that the contrasts with English are not unique to Brazilian Portuguese.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science |
| Editors | Friederike Moltmann |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
| Pages | 141-157 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9789027260437 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2020 |
Publication series
| Name | Language Faculty and Beyond |
|---|---|
| Volume | 16 |
| ISSN (Print) | 1877-6531 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Funding
This work was partially funded by Israel Science Foundation grants 852-10 and 1345-13 to Susan Rothstein as well as by CNPq via a PQ grant to Roberta Pires de Oliveira.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico | |
| Israel Science Foundation | 1345-13, 852-10 |
Keywords
- Bare singulars
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Comparatives
- Counting
- Measuring
- Semantics