Bare nouns and (in)definiteness in contemporary Brazilian Portug

Between internal variation and language contact

Abstract

This article analyzes the behavior of bare nouns and the marking of (in)definiteness in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on media-related utterances. The aim of the study is to examine how the presence and absence of determiners affect the construction of referential meanings in newspaper headlines, media headlines, and widely circulated titles, describing the semantic-pragmatic effects associated with different patterns of nominal determination. The research adopts a qualitative and descriptive-analytical approach based on the analysis of seven utterances selected for presenting distinct configurations of nominal reference. The theoretical framework is grounded in the concepts of definiteness, indefiniteness, specificity, genericity, nominal reference, and bare nouns, drawing on contributions from formal semantics, usage-based grammar, and variationist sociolinguistics. The results show that the absence of an article does not automatically correspond to indefiniteness, just as the presence of an article does not guarantee univocal referential interpretations. The data indicate that bare singular and plural nouns may receive generic, existential, or contextually defined readings depending on the interaction between grammatical structure, discourse context, and textual genre conventions. The study concludes that nominal determination in Brazilian Portuguese is a multifactorial phenomenon whose interpretation emerges from the interplay among syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language use conditions.