Manfred Krifka. Bare NPs: Kind-referring, Indefinites, Both, or Neither? To be published in the proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13.

Conclusion This paper set out with the controversy around the semantic nature of bare NPs in English: Are they kind referring, or ambiguous between a kind-referring and an indefinite interpretation. The answer, which required a type shift framework as developed in Chierchia (1998), is: Bare NPs are basically properties, hence they are neither kind-referring nor indefinites. They can be shifted to one or the other interpretation in appropriate linguistic contexts. They cannot be called ambiguous either, as their basic meaning is always a property. In a sense, all disjuncts in the title of this talk are true: Bare NPs have kind-referring interpretations, they have indefinite interpretations, hence they have both kind-referring and indefinite. But basically they are neither one nor the other. The type shifting framework is flexible enough to make all these statements true.