Bare Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese: An experimental study on grinding
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much literature has explored the interpretation of the bare singular (BS) in Brazilian Portuguese. Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein (2011) claim that BS nouns are mass because they denote kinds and argue that this explains why only the BS in Brazilian Portuguese can have a non-cardinal interpretation. In this paper, based on an experimental task with Brazilian Portuguese adult speakers, we explore one of their predictions, namely that the ‘volume interpretation’ of the BS cannot be explained as a case of Grinding. Our results show that Grinding and Volume readings of a BS noun are not equivalent (in favor of their hypothesis). We also show that a volume interpretation of a noun is never preferred when a cardinal interpretation is available, but that this can be explained by other lexical and pragmatic factors. We conclude by suggesting that Rothstein’s (in press) distinction between counting and measuring accounts for the fact that non-cardinal readings are not grinding.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it