Coordinated bare nouns in French, Spanish and European Portuguese
Christina Märzhäuser · Studies in language companion series · 2013
Coordinated bare nouns of the form N and N , as analysed here for Spanish, Portuguese and French, go against syntactic restrictions: as fully referential NPs in argument position, they also appear as pre-verbal subjects with singular count nouns. Bare coordination has been associated with lexicalisation and stereotypicality/naturalness, but it is also productive with less stereotypical combinations. My analysis reveals conditions for bare coordination: its elements have to belong to a shared semantic frame, either ontologically given or constructed in discourse. They usually share basic semantic traits (such as [± animate], [± human]). Bare coordination ex-presses a special relationship between the coordinated elements. Their reference is not necessarily definite, but can be derived from contextual clues, for example from a common hyperonym.