THE SEMANTICS OF GENERIC QUANTIFICATION IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE * Ana Müller University of Sªo Paulo, Brazil (forthcoming 2002. PROBUS 14 (2). Berlin: Mouton der Gruyter) 0 Introduction This paper investigates the semantics of kind-referring expressions and of generic quantification in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). It may thus be taken as a contribution to the development of a more accurate understanding of genericity as a crosslinguistic phenomenon. In BP genericity may be expressed by both definite singular (1) and definite plural (2) nominals, and also by indefinite nominals such as the indefinite generic (3), the bare numberless (4) and the bare plural (5). 1 The main goal of the paper is to address the differences in the interpretations of these five types of generic expressions in BP in light of the distinction between generically quantified sentences and kind-referring expressions (cf. Krifka et al.1995). * This paper was written during my stay as a visitor at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I thank CAPES and FAPESP for financing my visit and the UMass Linguistics department for hosting me. A first version of this paper was presented at the Proseminar in Semantics 1999 at UMass, and I thank the audience for criticisms and comments. In particular, I am very grateful to Barbara Partee for carefully reading and commenting on the paper. I also thank the two anonimous referees for fruitful comments and criticisms. All mistakes are my responsibility, of course. 1 Throughout this paper I use the terms ’nominal’ and ’nominal expression’ when I wish to remain neutral to the debate of whether the nominal constituent is a Determiner Phrase or a Noun Phrase. I also opt for the term ’bare numberless’, instead of the more traditional ’bare singular’ because I do not want to assume that this nominal has already undergone a singularizing operation.