Number as an adjunct in Romance

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that Spanish (and other Romance languages such as Catalan), contrary to what has been believed up to now, patterns with languages such as Brazilian Portuguese and French. We present several different arguments to support our proposal that in the Romance languages we investigate plural marking is specified and interpreted on functional categories, namely on Determiners. We propose that in these languages plural marking is a syntactic adjunct to D (i.e., a categorized d root) by default, and to a categorized n root in marked cases. Manifestations of (plural) Number on other constituents within the nominal domain are to be considered solely as the output of morphophonological agreement or concord.