O plural no português brasileiro e no inglês: comparando através das línguas

The squib studies the distribution and interpretation of the plural morpheme in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese (PB) taking as background Chierchia’ semantic parameters (2010, 2015) and the theoretical framework developed there. Data from PB shows that: (i) semantically, plural is inclusive (the exclusion of the atoms is an implicature); (ii) the opposition between no-morphology and morphology is significant in the determiner; (iii) in argument position, there is no opposition between the Bare Singular and the Bare Plural. The paper develops a unified analysis and claims that PB is a number marked languages as English, but they differ with respect to when Atomization (AT) applies. In PB, AT is a restriction in the domain of the determiner, a presupposition of the determiner; in English AT is an operation on the predicate (Chierchia 2010, 2015).