Bare nouns

Bare nouns (BNs) are noun phrases that are not introduced by a determiner. They have constituted a central case study into the logical form of natural language and one of the most challenging empirical domains for generally accepted hypotheses on the syntax/semantics interface. The main challenge they pose is in identifying the syntactic conditions that license them. It is by now clear that the distributional properties of BNs cannot be accounted for on purely syntactic grounds, but require also an investigation of their interpretative qualities. Interpretatively, BNs cannot be straightforwardly reduced to other well-known types of quantification and relate in complex ways to distinctions such as episodic/generic, kind/individual, and stage-level/individual-level. A first phase of investigation of BNs in contemporary theoretical linguistics, initiated by G. Carlson in the 1970s, focused mainly on issues of logical form. The theory devised by Carlson rejects the quantificational analysis of BNs and regards them as names of kinds, whose interpretive outcome depends on the nature of the predicate they combine with. Carlson's analysis, although conceptually appealing and empirically motivated for English, nevertheless precludes the availability of interpretations of BNs that are in fact well-attested and is unable to account for the large cross-linguistic variation in the distribution of BNs. On the basis of these criticisms, a second phase of investigation developed, characterized by the resurgence of quantificational theories of BNs. In this chapter, we offer an overview of both phases, their motivations, theoretical foundations, strengths, and shortcomings. We then focus more specifically on the issue of whether the cross-linguistic variation should be parameterized at the syntactic or at the semantic level. We consider proposals of both types and offer a critical overview of their strengths and shortcomings. We conclude by presenting the most recent developments in the study of BNs in predicate position.