Bare singulars are kind denoting expressions: an empirical investigation

Abstract

The paper presents the results of an investigation into oral and written language corpora and of a psycholinguistic experiment on the grammaticality of generic sentences in Brazilian Portuguese with bare singular. There is no consensus in the literature concerning the grammaticality of these sentences (Munn & Schmitt (1999, 2005) vs. Müller (2000, 2002, 2003)). Consequently, there is disagreement about the denotation of bare singulars: for some authors they denote species (Munn & Schmitt), for others, they are indefinites (Müller). Our investigation shows that there are occurrences of bare singular in kind denoting sentences in the corpora, and that at least for some dialects they are grammatical; giving support to Munn & Schmitt’ approach.