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Part of
Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics: Papers selected from the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48), Toronto, 25-28 April 2018
Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 193–206

Chapter 11
Value and cardinality in the evaluation of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese

| University of Toronto
| Massey University

Previous studies have explored two semantic features – cardinality and volume – to shown that bare singulars such as banana in Eu comi banana (I ate banana) allows a count and a mass interpretation in Brazilian Portuguese. In this chapter we explore whether other features such as value impact the interpretation of such nouns. The results of our priming and judgment studies indicate that cardinality is grammatically more relevant than value when interpreting Brazilian Portuguese bare singulars. However, we found a significant increase in reaction times when value was primed early. Therefore, value plays a role in the processing of bare singulars.

Keywords: bare singulars, Brazilian Portuguese, priming, semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dimensions of comparison beyond cardinality
  • 3.Studies
    • 3.1Study 1: Truth value judgment task
      • 3.1.1Materials and methods
      • 3.1.2Results
    • 3.2Study 2: Priming task
      • 3.2.1Materials and methods
      • 3.2.2Results
    • 3.3Control items
      • 3.3.1Materials and methods
      • 3.3.2Results
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.11lim
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