The Scope of Bare Nominals

Abstract

Carlson (1977) established that bare plurals in English always take narrow scope. Similar claims have been made for bare nominals in many other languages. In this paper we present an experiment that allows us to put these claims to the test. It consists in eliciting native speakers’ judgments on the acceptability of wide scope interpretations for bare nominals, full indefinites and negative polarity items. The rationale behind the experiment is that if bare nominals are unable to take wide scope we expect them to pattern with negative polarity items and not with full indefinites in environments that force wide scope. We give a full presentation of the English version of the experiment and a preview of the Mandarin Chinese and Dutch versions. The results of the English experiment show that bare nominals are hardly less acceptable in wide scope configurations than full indefinites, while they score significantly better than negative polarity items. These results shed doubt on the received view on the scopal properties of English bare plurals and – if replicated for other languages – will force a change in the way we model the semantics of bare nominals universally.