Number agreement in adjectives of cumulative and distributive predication structures in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 25/06901-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Maria Filomena Spatti Sandalo
• Grantee: Anna Carolina de Oliveira Almeida
• Supervisor: Michael Wagner
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: McGill University, Canada
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/13488-3 - An experimental investigation of phonological, morphological, and semantic variables of alternating diminutives in Brazilian Portuguese, BP.MS

Abstract

This proposal aims to investigate number agreement in cumulative and distributive predication structures of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), focusing on two syntactic environments: copular constructions (e.g. os estudantes que começam amanhã são colombiano(s) e argentino(s) "the students who start tomorrow are Colombian and Argentinian") and post-nominal modification (e.g. os estudantes colombiano(s) e argentino(s) começam amanhã "the Colombian and Argentinian students start tomorrow"). This proposal is part of a broader project coordinated by Professor Michael Wagner (McGill University) on agreement within the noun phrase across Romance languages. Building on Adamson (2024)'s analysis of split coordination in Italian, which allows plural nouns to be modified by singular adjectives, this project aims to test whether similar patterns occur in BP and how they are best analysed. We will conduct online experiments assessing native speakers' judgments on agreement patterns. The experiments will manipulate variables such as cardinality (two vs. many referents), type of predication (cumulative vs. distributive) and agreement marking (singular vs. plural adjectives), and the data will be analyzed statistically to determine how number agreement in cumulative and distributive predication structures of BP behaves. The findings will contribute to the broader theoretical debate on the nature of agreement. We explore the hypothesis that agreement is semantic and tracks whether the adjectives apply cumulatively or distributively. Our experiments explore the predictions of this account compared to a syntactic multidominance account.