Earticle

This study goes to propose a hypothesis being capable of explaining the relation between categorial meaning, which includes kind-refering and generic meaning, and forms of nouns that saturate it. Argument positions are generally occupied by nouns. However, not all forms of nouns are allowed to be inserted in those positions according to the meanings assigned by predicates. In many previous works, it has been focused on the positional relations between predicates and its arguments without considering how or what decide the proper form of nouns to saturate the categorial meaning. In this study, I adopt an alternative approach doing focus on forms of nouns themselves to show how a noun can saturate the categorial meaning through cognitive processes independently from its syntactic position. According to my hypothesis, saturation of categorial meaning is completely depends on cognitive processes of noun itself which I visualized in the name of noun profile. This profile explains how the categorial meaning can be saturated with nouns with proper forms according to the nouns types, namely massive and common nouns or count and uncountable nouns. I introduced the notion of metonymy, synecdoche, more precisely, to expand my theory to the case where a singular noun represent the categorial meaning. Furthermore, I suggest here constraints on construal operations that can be explain the conflicts between languages possibly resulted from my hypothesis. In this article, while I use mainly portuguese and brazilian portuguese corpus to justify my theory, I strongly believe that this hypothesis be applicable to other languages as far as human cognitive competence is universal.