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This paper investigates the availability of anaphoric readings with bare nouns in languages without definite articles, with a special focus on kind-level interpretation. Various facts from Serbian, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Hindi shows that the anaphoric reading of bare nouns is constrained by two general factors: (i) number morphology; in particular, whether the language in question has number morphology to begin with, and if it does, whether the bare noun in question is mass or count, and (ii) kind interpretation. It seems that mass and plural nouns can have anaphoric readings only if they are not interpreted as kinds. Singular count bare nouns, on the other hand, do not seem to be restricted in this way: they can have anaphoric readings regardless of whether or not they are interpreted as kinds. I argue that this state of affairs naturally follows from the system developed in Dayal (2004), which is based on a limited set of type-shifting operations and a particular analysis of number morphology. Alternative approaches to interpretation of bare nouns, on the other hand, do not seem to directly predict this sort of variation and require additional assumptions to account for it. |
