The Semantics of Bare NPs and Genericity in Korean

Abstract

Investigating certain dependencies that hold among the quantificational properties of bare NPs (BNPs), the types of predications and the types of predicates, I first observe that topic-marked BNPs and exhaustively focused ones may give rise to a generic interpretation regardless of which type of predicates is predicated of them. Tackling the question of how these NPs contribute to the generic interpretation of the sentences they are part of, I argue that they are proper names of kinds when they are interpreted as generics. This naturally leads me to represent the proper and derived kind predications involving (thematically) topic-marked BNPs in terms of the implicational logical structure which incorporates the notion 'Homogeneous Recognizable Subclass' introduced by Link (1988) and the identity relation that equates kinds, their individual-level or stage-level realizations, and sums of these realizations.