Bare nouns and changes in the D system: insights from Old Portuguese

Description

Bare nouns have been an ongoing topic of research ever since Abney’s (1987) DP hypothesis. The existence of a DP projection has been consensually adopted in the
literature, as well as the idea that “DPs can be arguments, NPs cannot”, following Longobardi (2001:581).
In Contemporary European Portuguese (CEP), bare singulars are generally ruled out from argument positions and bare plurals are only accepted under special circumstances. However, data from Old Portuguese suggest that bare singulars were more freely allowed. Examples (1) and (2) illustrate a contrast between Old and Contemporary Portuguese.

In this presentation, Clara Pinto compares the frequency of bare nouns in syntactically annotated texts from 13th to the 18th century, extracted from diachronic corpora. The results point to a progressive decrease of singular bare nouns as arguments, suggesting a possible change from a system that allowed null Ds to one that demands this position to be lexically filled, as is the case of CEP.

Period	5 Oct 2022
Event title	Congreso Internacional de Corpus Diacrónicos en Lenguas Iberorrománicas
Event type	Conference
Conference number	vi
Location	Venice, ItalyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International