Mínimo e máximo em estruturas nominais – uma análise semântica

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the semantics of the portuguese phrases with the form o mínimo/máximo N (‘the minimum N’) and o mínimo/máximo de N (‘the minimum/maximum of N’). Some nouns may occur in both of these constructions, while others might occur in only one of them, and still other nouns might occur only if accompanied by a modal operator. The proposal is made that these facts can be straightforwardly explained by the hypothesis that the first and the second of these syntactic constructions have, respectively, an exten-sional and an intensional meaning, together with the fact that some nouns have the same denotation in any possible world, while others denote different sets of entities in different possible worlds.