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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16: Selected papers from the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Newark, Delaware
Edited by Irene Vogel
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16] 2020
► pp. 77–92

Number as an adjunct in Romance

| University of Campinas
| Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

In this paper, we argue that Spanish (and other Romance languages such as Catalan), contrary to what has been believed up to now, patterns with languages such as Brazilian Portuguese and French. We present several different arguments to support our proposal that in the Romance languages we investigate plural marking is specified and interpreted on functional categories, namely on Determiners. We propose that in these languages plural marking is a syntactic adjunct to D (i.e., a categorized d root) by default, and to a categorized n root in marked cases. Manifestations of (plural) Number on other constituents within the nominal domain are to be considered solely as the output of morphophonological agreement or concord.

Keywords: pluralizer, adjunct, determiner, nominalizer, Romance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Number is encoded and interpreted on D
    • 2.1Arguments from the literature
    • 2.2Additional arguments
  • 3.Analysis
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.16.06cyr
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