Abstract

One striking property of bare nouns is that they are neither singular nor plural, but somehow “neutral” or “unspecified” for number, as suggested by the somewhat cumbersome English translation ‘one or more books’. Following Corbett (2000) we will say that bare nouns in Mandarin have GENERAL NUMBER. In this paper we investigate semantic and pragmatic properties of bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese, restricting ourselves to bare nouns with an existential interpretation, as in (1). In particular, we will address the question how indefinite bare nouns differ from what we will call INDEFINITE FULL DPS, such as English a book and some books, or their counterparts in Mandarin (yi) ben shu ‘a/one book’ and yixie shu ‘some books’:

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