The Semantic Analysis Of Chinese Bare NPs

Bare Noun Phrases (henceforth bare NPs) refer to noun phrases consisting ofjust a bare common noun without any functional elements such as determiners,classifiers, quantifiers, or numerals. It has received much attention since it was firstanalyzed by Carlson in the1970s. Researches on Chinese noun phrases have beenrather weak in comparison with verb phrases. Actually Chinese noun phrases displaya very complex performance both in syntax and semantics. The semantics of bareNPs in particular has become an important and controversial issue. About thesemantics of Chinese bare NPs, there are two dominant views: first, there is a strongtendency for bare NP subjects (or preverbal) to have a definite reading and bare NPobjects (or post verbal) to have an indefinite reading; second, stage-level predicatesand individual-level predicates determine the interpretation of Chinese bare NPs.However the language facts tell us that the definiteness of bare NPs does notcorrespond with the syntactic relations and it is also difficult for the nature ofpredicates to give a uniform interpretation.Based on the previous studies, the present research attempts to probe into thesemantics of bare NPs in Mandarin Chinese within the framework of thetype-shifting theory from the formal semantics and Erteschik-Shir’ focus structuretheory. This thesis finds that when the bare NPs function as topics, they tend toreceive generic reading or definite reading. Bare NPs as subjects can receiveindefinite interpretation when there is a stage topic, in which case bare NPs in subjectposition go to the focus domain. Concerning the issue how the various readings ofChinese Bare NPs are derived, we propose that the bare NPs retain a uniformdenotation to kind and other interpretations are derived from the basic kind denoting.