Bare noun phrases in focus

DP hypothesis for Japanese “bare” noun phrases

Definite and Bare Kind-denoting Noun Phrases

To express the same meaning, Romance languages (here and elsewhere, I exemplify with Italian), standardly use noun phrases with a definite article: the plural definite with count nouns and the singular definite with mass nouns (sing. il/la/lo/l’, plur. i/gli/le) (2). A singular definite article with count nouns is also possible (3), with the same restrictions as in English (see e.g. Lawler 1973...

Identifying Generic Noun Phrases

This paper presents a supervised approach for identifying generic noun phrases in context. Generic statements express rulelike knowledge about kinds or events. Therefore, their identification is important for the automatic construction of knowledge bases. In particular, the distinction between generic and non-generic statements is crucial for the correct encoding of generic and instance-level i...

Weak Definite Noun Phrases

Semantic accounts of the definite article have tended to fall into two general classes: ‘uniqueness’ accounts (Russell, 1905), and ‘familiarity’ accounts (Heim, 1982; see also Abbott, 2004, inter alia). It is also generally known that there are instances of definite descriptions that are resistant to such analyses, and are difficult to subsume under either treatment, or even a combination of bo...

Noun Phrases Without Nouns

However, there are also many languages in which it is possible to have noun phrases in which there is no noun or pronoun, in which the only constituents of the noun phrase are words that otherwise occur as modifiers of nouns. For example, in the example in (1) from Nkore-Kiga, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda, the subject omuto ‘young’ is a word that normally functions in the language as an ad...