Abstract:

The issue of bare NPs in English starts from Carlson(1977).Since the 1990's syntactic and semantic parameters have been proposed to account for the cross-linguistic variation of bare NPs.This article mainly examines the semantics of bare NPs in English and Mandarin Chinese,arguing that Chierchia's nominal mapping parameter per se cannot account for the similarities and differences between the bare NPs in English and Chinese.Type-shifting theory gives a unified explanation,with type-shifting operators ∩ and $ uniformly accounting for the genericity and existenality of English and Chinese bare NPs,and the type-shifting operators ι and $ accounting for the semantic variation of the two languages.Type-shifting theory adheres to Freg's principle of composionality and reveals some of the underlying principles of human languages.