Interpreting Yoruba bare nouns as generic

Chinese Bare Nouns as Kind - Denoting Terms

This paper addresses an interesting array of facts about Chinese common nouns in some detail. For example, Chinese common nouns, in their bare forms, often stand alone at argument positions, display a variety of context-sensitive interpretations, never combine with numerals without an intervening classifier, and combine with a plurality marker in a highly selective way. It is argued that this w...

Japanese Bare Nouns as Weak Indefinites

Japanese Bare Nouns (JBNs) appear to behave like indefinites in some contexts, and mass nouns in some other contexts. For example, when accomplishment verbs have JBNs as their theme, they are modified by both in-adverbs and for-adverbs. This paper first claims that JBNs are weak indefinites and introduce a variable to be bound by Existential Closure. Second, it shows how telic predicates are de...

Bare Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese

Interpreting Anaphoric Shell Nouns using Antecedents of Cataphoric Shell Nouns as Training Data

Interpreting anaphoric shell nouns (ASNs) such as this issue and this fact is essential to understanding virtually any substantial natural language text. One obstacle in developing methods for automatically interpreting ASNs is the lack of annotated data. We tackle this challenge by exploiting cataphoric shell nouns (CSNs) whose construction makes them particularly easy to interpret (e.g., the ...

Bare nouns and number in Dëne Sųłiné

This paper documents the number-related properties of Dëne Sųłiné (Athapaskan). Dëne Sųłiné has neither number inflection nor numeral classifiers. Nouns are bare, occur as such in argument positions, and combine directly with numerals. With these traits, Dëne Sųłiné represents a type of language that is little considered in formal typologies of number and countability. The paper critiques one i...