A não uniformidade das bases numerais: uma visão dos contrastes das bases cardinais do português brasileiro

Abstract

The cardinal bases -enta ‘-ty’, cem ‘hundred’, mil ‘thousand’ and milhão ‘million’, bilhão ‘billion’, …, organize Brazilian Portuguese numerals into a decimal numeral system. Despite their common mathematical function, I argue that cardinal bases cannot be characterized in a linguistically uniform manner. Rather, this paper systematizes contrasts between them at the levels of syntax (possibility of ellipsis and distribution with respect to quantifiers), category (gender and number agreement behavior and licensing of pseudo-partitive constructions) and morphology (differences on morphologic structure and degrees of productivity). The non-uniformity of numeral bases hereby defended has impacts on both the extent to which the Faculty of Language is sensitive to the mathematical characterization of bases and on the inherent grammatical diversity of these objects in Brazilian Portuguese.