“10 ovos caipira vermelhos”:

silent nouns na concordância nominal do PB

Abstract

This paper presents a work on nominal concord in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) structures, such as the following: a. “10 ovos caipira vermelhos” (10 egg-PL caipira red-PL / ‘10 red pasture-raised eggs’) a’. “10 ovos [(do TIPO) caipira] vermelhos” (10 egg-PL (of-the TYPE) caipira red-PL / ‘10 red pasture-raised eggs’) Most of the data were collected from written sources that intend to apply standard patterns of agreement, id est, the redundant plural marking in the constituents of the DP. That is why the morpheme -s is marked in ovos and vermelhos (ia). Being so, why is the word caipira (ia) unmarked with the plural morpheme? Following Kayne’s (2005, 2019, and 2021a,b), Pesetsky’s (2013), Höhn’s (2016), and XXXX’s (2016a,b, 2017, 2018a,b,c 2020a,b and 2023) approach on structures with apparent mismatch of agreement, I argue that (ia) licenses a silent noun TIPO (TYPE), preceded by the preposition de (‘of’), as illustrated in (ia’). Therefore, caipira is inflected in singular, because it agrees in number with a singular silent noun. This analysis also applies to other structures that license the silent nouns TAMANHO (SIZE), TOM (HUE), and SOBRENOME (SURNAME). As a result, there is no “unagreement”, in the phrases at stake, but agreement between the adjective and a silent noun, in the DP-internal structure.