Between Kinds and Properties: Bare Plurals across Languages

It is well known that English sentences containing bare plurals (henceforth BPs) are ambiguous. Under one reading, they can be interpreted as a predication of some property directly of a kind, as in (1a), which says that the kind dog is extinct. Alternatively, they can express some characterizing property of instances of a kind, as in (1b), which says that, in general, individual dogs are intelligent. Yet a third reading is existential, as in (1c), which says that some dogs are barking outside right now.