Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the support of many friends and colleagues. I would like to thank Johannes Kabatek, Uli Reich, and Elisabeth Stark for inspiration, for generously sharing their expertise with me at different stages of the research, and for carefully commenting on the original manuscript. Johannes Kabatek drew my attention to Brazilian Portuguese bare nominals. Thus, his observations stood at the very beginning of the inquiry that eventually led to the publication of this book.

Furthermore, I owe a lot to my former colleagues from the SFB 833 Bedeutungskonstitution at the University of Tübingen: Peter Koch, Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta, Sam Featherston, Fabian Schlotterbeck, Oliver Bott, Robin Hörnig, Britta Stolterfoth, Sigrid Beck, and Vera Hohaus (just to name a few). I hope that a bit of the unique spirit of the collaborative and interdisciplinary work being done in Tübingen can be sensed throughout the following pages.

Several long and insightful discussions with Roberta Pires de Oliveira and Elissa Pustka were critical for the development of many ideas that appear in this book. The results presented here also profited from discussions in colloquia at Tübingen, Düsseldorf, Rio de Janeiro, Erlangen, Eichstätt, Heidelberg, the LOT summer school in Leuven, as well as conferences and workshops at Braga, Florianópolis, Split, Stockholm, Tübingen, Vienna, Vilnius, Würzburg, and Zurich, where parts of it were presented.

I would also like to thank Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen for accepting the book for their series as well as Kees Vaes at John Benjamins for invaluable help at every stage of the publication process. Thanks to Brock Schardin for accurate proofreading.

I am especially grateful for my friends in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (and surroundings) and for their hospitality and unconditioned support during my fieldwork trips: Célia Regina dos Santos Lopes, José Simões da Silva, Bruno Festas, Aldacy Gomes Leal Junior, and their families. Finally, I would like to thank my own family.

This work was supported financially by the DFG (SFB 833 Bedeutungskonstitution of the University of Tübingen, Germany) from 2009 to 2014 and since 2014 by the Institute of Romance Studies and the linguistic PhD program of the University of Zurich, Switzerland.