Since Carlson(1977), bare noun phrases(which willbe referred to as BNPs afterwards) have been a focus of linguistics in English. Gradually, the studies of bare noun phrase has also caught much attention in China. Desp...Since Carlson(1977), bare noun phrases(which willbe referred to as BNPs afterwards) have been a focus of linguistics in English. Gradually, the studies of bare noun phrase has also caught much attention in China. Despite of the extensive studies of BNPs in English and Chinese respectively, a systematic comparison between English and Chinese BNPs in semantic readings is still less developed. More detailed studies and comparisons are obviously desirable. Most linguists agree that the semantics of the predicates, syntactic distribution and pragmatic factors all have a role to play in determining the interpretation of BNPs. Thus the paper has systematically made a semantic comparison between English BNPs and Chinese BNPs in terms of different predicate types and different syntactic distributions following the four semantic readings of BNPs of Shen(2005), namely, generic reading, existential reading,definite reading and non-referential reading.展开更多
文摘Since Carlson(1977), bare noun phrases(which willbe referred to as BNPs afterwards) have been a focus of linguistics in English. Gradually, the studies of bare noun phrase has also caught much attention in China. Despite of the extensive studies of BNPs in English and Chinese respectively, a systematic comparison between English and Chinese BNPs in semantic readings is still less developed. More detailed studies and comparisons are obviously desirable. Most linguists agree that the semantics of the predicates, syntactic distribution and pragmatic factors all have a role to play in determining the interpretation of BNPs. Thus the paper has systematically made a semantic comparison between English BNPs and Chinese BNPs in terms of different predicate types and different syntactic distributions following the four semantic readings of BNPs of Shen(2005), namely, generic reading, existential reading,definite reading and non-referential reading.
