Full Description
This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena, the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations, the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.
Contents
1. Laying bare nominal determination: An introduction to the present volume (by Wall, Albert); 2. Some cross-linguistic aspects of bare NP distribution: Modern Hebrew and Brazilian Portuguese (by Rothstein, Susan D.); 3. Bare nominals, bare predicates: Properties and related types (by Espinal, M. Teresa); 4. Spanish bare plurals and topicalization (by Laca, Brenda); 5. Information structure and the distribution of Spanish bare plurals (by Leonetti, Manuel); 6. Bare nominals in American-Spanish headlines (by Rivera, Daniel M. Saez); 7. Bare singular arguments in Brazilian Portuguese: Perfectivity, telicity, and kinds (by Pires De Oliveira, Roberta); 8. The distribution of specific and definite bare nominals in Brazilian Portuguese (by Wall, Albert); 9. 'Bare quantifiers' and topics in Italian (by Floricic, Franck); 10. Coordinated bare nouns in French, Spanish and European Portuguese (by Marzhauser, Christina); 11. Bare vs. non-bare nouns: Two kinds of indefinites in Bulgarian (by Gorishneva, Elena); 12. Index
