Manfred Krifka. “Bare NPs: Kind-referring, Indefinites, Both, or Neither?”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/BarePluralsSalt13.pdf To be published in the proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13.
bq. Conclusion This paper set out with the controversy around the semantic nature of bare NPs in English: Are they kind referring, or ambiguous between a kind-referring and an indefinite interpretation. The answer, which required a type shift framework as developed in Chierchia (1998), is: Bare NPs are basically properties, hence they are neither kind-referring nor indefinites. They can be shifted to one or the other interpretation in appropriate linguistic contexts. They cannot be called ambiguous either, as their basic meaning is always a property. In a sense, all disjuncts in the title of this talk are true: Bare NPs have kind-referring interpretations, they have indefinite interpretations, hence they have both kind-referring and indefinite. But basically they are neither one nor the other. The type shifting framework is flexible enough to make all these statements true.
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