On the Number and Reference of the Bare Nouns in Chinese and English from the Weakly Argumentative Nouns in Chinese

It is a consensus in linguistics that Chinese bare nouns can freely serve as arguments like subjects and objects, forming the basis for research on the count-mass distinction, classifiers, plurality, definiteness, and related categories in Chinese. However, recent studies demonstrate that Chinese actually possesses a significant proportion of weakly argumentative nouns that are difficult to function as arguments. Through a semantic examination of Chinese weakly argumentative nouns, this article proposes that they semantically denote singularity and fall into three major types: group nouns, group subkind nouns, and unit nouns. Like their English counterparts, singular Chinese weakly argumentative nouns cannot appear in argument positions; they default to being predicates, with the semantic type <e, t>. Based on this, the article reconsiders Chierchia’s (1998a) analysis, which uniformly treats Chinese bare nouns as +argument, –predicate. In contrast, it argues that Chinese nouns can be uniformly analyzed as predicates, whereas English is a +argument, +predicate language where bare mass nouns default to arguments and count nouns to predicates.