draft of November 2011

4.1.2 Towards a crosslinguistic typology of bare nouns
In his seminal paper on kinds, Chierchia (1998) proposes a semantic parameter according to
which languages vary in the way their nouns may be allowed to function as arguments or
not. Accordingly, there is variation across languages in the denotation of nominal categories:
nouns may be classified by means of two features, [+/-pred] and [+/-arg]. In Italian, for
instance (and Romance more generally), noun phrases are [+pred],[-arg], hence are always
headed by a determiner head D to turn into arguments. By contrast, English nouns are
optionally [+pred] or [+arg]. Thus, a D often heads a predicative noun to form an argument,
but English allows nouns to function as arguments without D, as in the case of bare plurals.
The hypothesis accounts for a number of contrasts between Italian and English. Where English
allows bare plurals as in (36), Italian necessarily involves a definite article (37a), or some
indefinite determiner (37b) or the bare-partitive construction (37c). Bare nouns in Italian are
assumed to involve a null D (Longobardi 1986,1994, Chierchia 1998) and are restricted to
some special governed positions, a syntactic condition necessary for licensing the null D head.
(36) a. Lions are wild animals.
b. Dogs are barking in the courtyard.
c. Water is dripping from the faucet.
(37) a. i leoni sono animali selvaggi
the lions are animals of wild
Lions are wild animals.
b. alcuni cani stavano giocando nel giardino
some dogs were playing in-the garden
Some dogs were playing in the garden.
c. Del vino si e’
of-the wine refl past
Some wine got spilled.
rovesciato
spill
23
(Chierchia 1998)
(Adapted from Chierchia 1998)