Individuation and Quantification: Do bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese individuate?

Some have proposed that speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, have to rely on classifiers for acquiring individuated meanings of nouns (e.g., Borer 2005; Lucy 1992). This paper examines this view by looking at how Mandarin adults interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in three experiments. Experiment 1 found that Mandarin-speaking adults quantify nouns that are equivalent to English count, mass, and mass-count flexible nouns just like English speakers from a previous study. Experiment 2 showed that adults quantified over broken objects using the noun criteria but not classifier knowledge. Our last experiment found that Mandarin adults would attend to classifier syntax when the units of quantification are vague, as in the case of mass-count flexible nouns such as apple or rock. Taken together, we argue that individuation can be specified lexically, and does not come from classifier syntax.