On discourse referential properties of bare singulars in Spanish

Abstract

Spanish as a Romance language has a determiner system, but also allows for the presence of nominals without determiners. Some recent literature (Espinal and McNally, 2009; Espinal, 2010) accounts for the difference between Spanish bare nominals and singular indefinites and claims that whereas BNs denote properties of types of individuals, regular indefinites denote entities. The aim of this thesis is to explore the manifestation of this semantic distinction in terms of the discourse referential properties of BNs and regular indefinites. Three experiments are carried out in which their capacity to introduce referential expressions in discourse is examined. Two of the experiments are pen and paper questionnaires and the third experiment is a corpus study. Results show that BNs and regular indefinites present dissimilar behaviors under different forms in discourse. Such results go along with the initial hypothesis that BNs are not able to introduce discourse referents, whereas regular indefinites are.