Bare nominals, bare predicates

In this paper I will address the topic of identifying the semantic types that can be associated with bare nominals (BNs) in Romance languages such as Catalan and Spanish. I will show that, even in argument position, BNs do not always have a referential index (Baker 2003) and may occur as syntactic objects without being semantic arguments. I will assume the hypotheses that (i) object BNs (i.e. bare count nominals unmarked for number and definiteness) denote properties of kinds (Espinal 2010a; Espinal & McNally 2007b, 2011), and (ii) bare nominal predicates (i.e. bare count nominals that agree in number with a copular verb and occur in predicate position) denote either properties of individual objects or gradable properties of sortal concepts. I will support the claim that BNs that denote capacities are not a subtype of entities (de Swart et al. 2007), but instead correspond to property-denoting expressions.