Chinese Bare Nouns as Kind - Denoting Terms

This paper addresses an interesting array of facts about Chinese common nouns in some detail. For example, Chinese common nouns, in their bare forms, often stand alone at argument positions, display a variety of context-sensitive interpretations, never combine with numerals without an intervening classifier, and combine with a plurality marker in a highly selective way. It is argued that this wide array of language-particular properties can best be explained by extending to Chinese the basic hypothesis that bare NPÕs are kind-denoting terms cross-linguistically (Carlson 1977, etc).