General Number and the Semantics and Pragmatics of Indefinite Bare Nouns in Mandarin Chinese

By H. Rullmann, Aili You. Where Semantics meets Pragmatics, 2006

99 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One striking property of bare nouns is that they are neither singular nor plural, but somehow “neutral” or “unspecified” for number, as suggested by the somewhat cumbersome English translation ‘one or more books’. Following Corbett (2000) we will say that bare nouns in Mandarin have GENERAL NUMBER. In this paper we investigate semantic and pragmatic properties of bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese, restricting ourselves to bare nouns with an existential interpretation, as in (1). In particular, we will address the question how indefinite bare nouns differ from what we will call INDEFINITE FULL DPS, such as English a book and some books, or their counterparts in Mandarin (yi) ben shu ‘a/one book’ and yixie shu ‘some books’:

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33291598f71d32a41eed89eaf211ad5b84dceff7

How researchers see this paper

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In Artificial Intelligence

1. Donka F. Farkas
2. Henriëtte de Swart
3. Scott Anderbois

In Language and Linguistics

1. Donka F. Farkas
2. Henriëtte de Swart
3. Scott Anderbois

Citations in the corpus

• The semantics and pragmatics of plurals (2010, methodology): “A full-fledged analysis of languages such as Chinese, which lack morphological number altogether, goes beyond the scope of this paper, but note that our set-up is in line with a semantics of Chinese nominals in terms of general number (Rullmann & You 2003).”