Revisiting Gouet (1976): nominal agreement in DPs containing brand names

Abstract

This paper retrieves a work by Gouet (1976) that has traversed the last six decades and has endured, with current relevance, by recognizing, in a pioneering manner, the need to consider null elements for identifying formal and syntactic concord patterns. Specifically, Gouet (1976) addresses data from French (Un Bourgogne blanc, s’il vous plait!), where the article (un) is inflected in a gender different from the gender of the noun (Bourgogne) that follows it. According to the author, the article’s masculine gender reflects the masculine gender of the product name (vin), which is covert in the phrase, as opposed to the feminine gender of the brand name (Bourgogne), which is overt. The mentioned agreement pattern with a null noun proves to be consistent with data from Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (Um Bourgogne branco, por favor!), corresponding to those of French that contain commercial brand names, which will be explored in this paper. The mentioned pattern also aligns with the one revealed by recent research (Pereira, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023a-b, 2024a-c) on a series of other BP structures that show agreement with silent nouns (Kayne, 2005, 2019, 2021). The dialogue with this research allows for proposing a syntactic analysis of the data, thus presented. Therefore, this paper revisits Gouet (1976) due to its contribution to the studies on nominal concord, especially concerning the role of covert nouns.