Speaker: Bruna Karla Pereira (UFVJM; CAPES Foundation- Ministry of Education of Brazil) Title: The plural morpheme in BP nominal concord
This talk is focused on number nominal concord in non-standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP). I will start by analyzing structures with the wh-determiner ‘ques’ (1) and end by examining the pattern of nominal concord in other structures too.
(1) Ques coisa interessante! (Nunes, 2007, p. 13) What-PL thing interesting ‘How interesting those things are!’
Concerning the syntactic derivation of (1), ‘ques’ is a head that checks φ-features in D, while the DP to which it belongs moves, from the predicate position of a Small Clause, to check illocutionary force in the Spec,CP (Pereira, 2014). Concerning the system of concord, non-standard BP marks, with the plural morpheme, either only D or D plus its most adjacent element, leaving the other elements unmarked. This fact has two consequences: as a D, ‘ques’ licenses φ-features, as opposed to previous predictions (Vidor; Menuzzi, 2004); as a morpheme that may appear more than once in the DP (Castro; Pratas, 2006, p. 18), ‘-s’ cannot be “singleton”, as opposed to current assumptions (Costa; Figueiredo Silva, 2006). In addition, besides structures with ‘ques’, data from dialectal BP show that other wh-words may be inflected (2); so does the indefinite article, followed by the numeral ‘meio(a)’ and a singular NP (3).
(2) Quantos que custa isso? How-much-PL that cost it ‘How much does it cost?’
(3) Nossa reunião pode ser daqui a umas meia hora? Our meeting may be from-here to some-PL half hour-SG ‘Could we have a meeting within half an hour?’
Therefore, apparent φ-feature “mismatches” will be addressed in order to investigate the system of nominal concord (Baker, 2008; Norris, 2014; Höhn, 2015) in BP.