Bare and Not-So-Bare Nouns and the Structure of NP

Abstract

This article examines the distribution and interpretational variability of bare nouns and [classifier+noun] phrases in Cantonese and Mandarin. We argue that bare nouns are never bare in structure and that [classifier+noun] phrases may have more structure than just Classifier Phrase. We show that the lack of articles and number morphology in Cantonese/Mandarin leads to many interesting differences between Chinese-type languages and English-/Italian-type languages.