Bare nouns in Mandarin are weak definites: experimental evidence and theoretical implications
In many languages common nouns like book or student do not refer to individual items or people without the help of a determiner, like a(n) or the in English. However, in some other languages they do so, and, in the case of Mandarin, they refer to individual items or people rather flexibly. For example, the common noun 猫 (mao) ‘cat’, also known as a bare noun, may refer to an indefinite cat (a cat known only to the speaker) or a definite cat (a cat known to both the speaker and the addressee).
Most scholars agree that some form of meaning flexibility is needed to understand the flexible reference of bare nouns in languages like Mandarin (Krifka 1995, Chierchia 1998, Yang 2000, Dayal 2004, 2013). However, they disagree on how to constrain this meaning flexibility.
According to the Constrained by Lexicalization (CBL) view, bare nouns can take on any determiner meaning as long as the determiner is not lexicalized in that language. This predicts that bare nouns in Mandarin are truly ambiguous between an indefinite meaning and a definite meaning. However, according to the Constrained by Lexicalization and Naturalness (CBLN) view, the meaning flexibility is subject to additional naturalness rankings, which rank the definite meaning as more natural than the indefinite meaning for bare nouns (Dayal 2004, 2013).
This preference for the definite meaning, although not discussed in the literature on bare nouns, has received widespread support in the literature on lexicalized referring expressions, such as the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel et al (1993, 2003) and Centering Theory (Grosz & Sidner 1986, Brennan et al. 1987). If correct, CBLN predicts that the indefinite meaning is in fact a form of weak definiteness similar to the use of the newspaper in ‘Mary read the newspaper’. and the hospital in ‘Paul was sent to the hospital’. which are known to lack uniqueness or familiarity (Carlson 2003, a.o.) and have reduced anaphoric potentials (Scholten & Aguilar-Guevara 2010).
In this study, we provide support to the CLBN view by drawing on the anaphoric potentials of bare nouns in Mandarin in a series of judgment and processing experimental studies. Specifically, we show that bare nouns, like weak definites and unlike indefinites, have reduced anaphoric potentials. These results echo the findings from bare singulars in Dutch and Persian, which also have reduced anaphoric potentials (Scholten & Aguilar-Guevara 2010, Modarresi & Krifka 2021). More broadly, this study paints a picture in which the study of under lexicalization and meaning flexibility in a language is informed not just by what is lexically possible in another language but also what is cognitively more natural among a set of possible enrichments.
Jess H.-K. Law is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests lie in semantics, pragmatics and experimental linguistics. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University (USA) and her M.A. and B.A. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has worked on a wide range of topics, including distributivity, speech acts, (in)definiteness, anaphora, focus intervention effects, argument structure, and gesture semantics.