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The usage of the Basque definite and indefinite articles differs significantly from their Romance counterparts. While the definite article is used as a default article for NPs without another determiner, the exact function of the indefinite article in this system has remained somewhat unclear, although specificity has been brought up as a factor. A comparison with Eastern Armenian, which has a threefold definiteness/specificity distinction, in three parallel texts shows that the use of the indefinite article in Basque follows two different systems in different varieties: in the West it is based on discourse prominence and in the East on individuation.

Linguistic theories in general, and psychomechanics in particular, with its essentially binary model, struggle to account for bare nouns within the larger system of the articles. Though the term ‘zero article’ is commonly found in the literature, there is hardly a consensus over its meaning. When dealing with French, where bare nouns remain marginal, one observes a fault line between one theoretical posture meaning to integrate it within the system of the article and another rejecting its existence altogether. In English, where bare nouns are much more frequent, the theory struggles with a multiplicity of different uses which are difficult to bring together under a single phenomenon. However, close inspection of the occurrences in the corpus makes it possible to suggest, in keeping with psychomechanics, a model where there is a coexistence of an absence of any determiner on the one hand and, on the other, a zero article which may be shown to signify a genuine operation of determination, defined as a transition of the noun from tongue to discourse resulting in its ability to refer.

Some Romance languages, like Spanish, encode narrow scope indefinite objects without any over determiner (Bare Nouns; como pan ‘I eat bread’), while others, like French, require the insertion of an overt prenominal marker, labeled Partitive Article (PA; je mange du pain ‘I eat bread’). This asymmetry has been related to overt number marking on the noun (Delfitto & Schroter, Stark 2016 a.o.), leading to the hypothesis that number morphs on N license indefinite arguments and that PAs appear in those languages in which they are absent. Languages as Italian, in which narrow scope indefinites can be introduced both by BNs and PAs, challenge this hypothesis. By enlarging the view to Northern Italian Dialects, we update the correlation with number marking (the relevant factor being the absence of number morphs on masculine Ns) and show that Italian-like languages are not problematic, once we develop an analysis of the alternation between PAs and BNs in these languages in terms of two kinds of indefinites, differentiated by the presence/absence (PAs/BNs) of a feature (tentatively identified as a Choice function, Reinhart 1997).

This paper demonstrates that bare nouns in Shan (Tai-Kadai) can express both unique and anaphoric definiteness, a distinction first noted by Schwarz (2009). This pattern of data as well as similar patterns found in Serbian and Kannada motivate adding a category to the typology of definiteness marking described by Jenks (2018) to include languages that allow bare nouns to express anaphoric definiteness. An extended type-shifting analysis offers an account of the availability of bare noun anaphora, as well as the other bare noun interpretations, such as the indefinite, generic, and kind interpretations. Variation in the use of bare nouns versus more marked anaphoric expressions is tied to pragmatic factors such as what anaphoric definite expressions are available in the language, contrast, information structure, and potential ambiguity of nominal expressions. This account proposes that a constrained semantic account of the interpretations of nominal expressions combined with a pragmatic account of their use can model much of the cross-linguistic data on definiteness.

In languages that have a definite article but no indefinite article, the definite article typically maps to definites, and the bare noun maps to indefinites. We investigate this mapping in Malagasy, which imposes an additional restriction: bare nouns cannot be subjects. We ask whether the subject can be interpreted as indefinite, given the obligatory nature of the article. We also look at DPs in other positions (direct object, clefted subjects) to determine whether the mapping between form and meaning is one-to-one. To answer these questions, we administered an on-line questionnaire that presented participants with the choice of the article or the bare noun in the different positions (subject, object, cleft) in contexts that favoured an indefinite/novel interpretation. As predicted, the article was obligatory in subject position, but disfavoured in the object and cleft position. These results confirm current descriptions in the literature. We compare these results with a similar case of definite article in indefinite nominals found in Italian and propose that the article does not carry definiteness features (at least in these cases) but overtly marks (abstract) Case assignment on subjects, while it can remain silent on objects.

In this paper, we offer some preliminary remarks on the syntax-semantics of the nominal system in Cape Verdean (CV) in comparison to English, with the aim of having a better understanding of Number Neutral Languages (Chierchia 2010; 2015). In CV, there are no bare plurals; the plural morpheme is attached to the definite or indefinite articles, which are not obligatory, and are ungrammatical with quantifiers. Thus, CV is not a Number Marking Language. However, it is not a Bare Language, since it distinguishes between mass nouns and count nouns, and numbers combine directly with count nouns. We argue that CV is number neutral. We claim that Baptista & Guéron’s (2007) proposal of a null determiner cannot fully explain the data presented in this paper. We advance the hypothesis that Number Neutral Languages do not select for predicates or kinds, but they are rule-governed by grammar. In argument position, bare nouns denote the kind directly, as in Mandarin, and in the scope of a determiner, they denote the predicate. The only covert operator is the iota. We propose that CV noun phrase has no number projection. The determiner selects for singular or plural, which is then a presupposition of the determiner. This approach predicts that occurrences of bare plural phrases in CV are very restricted. We aim to provide a better understanding of the nominal system in CV, a language under-represented in the literature, as a way to contribute to analyses of nominal grammars cross-linguistically.

This article presents a novel set of observations concerning partitive constructions that indicate that bare nouns in Japanese can be marked with the singular/plural distinction, despite the absence of its overt morphological reflection. The new data set challenges the currently dominant view that bare nouns are number-neutral in classifier languages. A way of accommodating the phenomenon with the syntactically represented singular/plural distinction is provided. Implications for noun classification are also discussed. It is then concluded that it is a mistake to regard Japanese nouns with count semantics as furniture-type nouns and that we need to recognize the familiar mass/count distinction in the language.

Much literature has explored the interpretation of the bare singular (BS) in Brazilian Portuguese. Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein (2011) claim that BS nouns are mass because they denote kinds and argue that this explains why only the BS in Brazilian Portuguese can have a non-cardinal interpretation. In this paper, based on an experimental task with Brazilian Portuguese adult speakers, we explore one of their predictions, namely that the ‘volume interpretation’ of the BS cannot be explained as a case of Grinding. Our results show that Grinding and Volume readings of a BS noun are not equivalent (in favor of their hypothesis). We also show that a volume interpretation of a noun is never preferred when a cardinal interpretation is available, but that this can be explained by other lexical and pragmatic factors. We conclude by suggesting that Rothstein’s (in press) distinction between counting and measuring accounts for the fact that non-cardinal readings are not grinding.

In this study I shall focus on two Romance idiomatic patterns and the semantics of nouns. It is shown that idioms, in addition to having distinct basic argument structure representations, are formed in syntax by various instantiations of Merge. It is argued that there is a lexicalization pattern reflecting semantic conflation (Talmy 1985, 2000) between cause and degree. This pattern, in syntactic terms, is the output of subsequent Merge operations (Chomsky 1995) between the object noun of a monadic argument structure, an indefinite quantifier and an adjunct phrase. The study of this lexicalization pattern is of interest with regard to the semantics of bare nouns, especially of bare count singular nouns in object position; it is proved that bare nouns are interpreted as properties, and, because of this, they permit quantification over degrees. By contrast, there is a second lexicalization pattern starting from a composite argument structure which licenses an individual or a kind denoting reading for the DP object.