European and Brazilian Portuguese have VP ellipsis licensed by auxiliary and main verbs. However, these varieties of Portuguese show some differences concerning the licensing and identification of the elliptical constituent whenever sequences of verbs including the main verb are involved. We will claim that these differences are mainly due to the functional projections required as licensers of the elliptical VP. 1 We will leave the distinction between VP ellipsis and Null Complement Anaphora for future work.

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In this paper we claim that Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese come in two shapes. Real BNs, by which we mean bare count nouns not specified for number and definiteness, correspond to NPs that can only occur as objects of a reduced class of predicates (namely, those that express a HAVE-relation) and are interpreted as property-type expressions. Other BNs can be definite and, although not morphophonologically specified for number, they are DPs with null Determiners morphosyntactically specified for Number features and are interpreted as entity-type expressions. We base our analysis on the distribution and meaning of BNs, by comparing BrP with other Romance languages, mainly (Old and Modern) French on the one hand, and Spanish and Catalan on the other.

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Inflectional languages, and Romance languages in particular, display morphological variation in plural marking within the nominal domain. While standard varieties show plural inflection on all the constituents within the DP, other varieties show this plural marking only on some of its constituents. We investigate a set of puzzling data and propose that Number in Romance is not a head, but an adjunct, an optional and bi‐valent morphosyntactic feature. We single out the hypothesis that, within the nominal domain, the pluralizer is in unmarked cases adjoined to D (i.e., a categorized d root), and in marked cases it is adjoined to a noun or an adjective (i.e., a categorized n/a root). We also discuss that instantiations of plural marking within the nominal domain should be conceived as the output of morphophonological concord, a post‐syntactic operation that is sensitive to c‐command.