Bare plural nominals in Romanian and French

In this paper we investigate Bare Plurals (BPs; NPPL) in English and Romanian and Bare Plural Partitives (BParts; i.e. des NPPL) in French. Romanian BPs and French BParts only share with English BPs the existential interpretation with obligatory narrow scope. We propose that this reading shared by all three comes from the same pieces: a non-kind-selecting predicate, a kind-denoting argument, and a special combination operation ‘Derived Kind Predication’ (DKP) glueing the two together by providing local existential quantification over instances of the kind. French BParts only have this reading because the partitive de spells out DKP. The kind and generic patterns for English, French, and Romanian fall out once we consider what happens when we remove DKP from this structure.