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Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science
Edited by Friederike Moltmann
[Language Faculty and Beyond 16] 2020
► pp. 141–158

Comparatives in Brazilian Portuguese

Counting and measuring

 | Bar-Ilan University
 | Universidade Federal do Paraná/CNPq
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.
Keywords: semantics, comparatives, bare singulars, measuring, counting, Brazilian Portuguese
Article outline
  • 1. Bale and Barner (2009)
  • 2.Brazilian Portuguese bare singular
  • 3.Naturally atomic (object) mass nouns in English
  • 4. Hungarian
  • 5.Theoretical analysis
  • 6.Flexible nouns: English and Brazilian Portuguese
  • 7.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.16.07rot
References (18)
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2024. The Interaction of Morphosyntax and Semantics in Romance Object Mass Nouns. In Nouns and the Morphosyntax / Semantics Interface, ► pp. 153 ff. DOI logo
Pires de Oliveira, Roberta
2023. Ways of Number Marking: English and Brazilian Portuguese. In Formal Approaches to Languages of South America, ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
Huang, Aijun, Jingjing Li & Luisa Meroni
2022. Grammatical and contextual factors affecting the interpretation of superordinate collectives in child and adult Mandarin. Linguistics 60:4 ► pp. 933 ff. DOI logo
Dellai, Érica Milani, Vitória Maria Jasper Ern, Léia de Jesus Silva, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, Beatriz Martins Rachadel & Bianca Maria de Souza
2021. A distinção massa e contável na gramática Rikbaktsa (Macro-Jê). LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 21 ► pp. e021007 ff. DOI logo

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