Bare singulars and relative measure in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese has received much attention in the nominal typology literature for being a language with a fully-fledged definite determiner system that also allows generalized bare singulars and bare plurals. We present a description of relative measures in Brazilian Portuguese showing that definiteness is a predictor of conservative construals and that non-conservative construals may be encoded by bare plurals and bare singulars. We show that the availability of bare singulars with a non-conservative interpretation in relative measure structures is compatible with an analysis of bare singulars as kind-denoting terms in the language.