Bare Plural Objects in English

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an account of why in certain environments bare plural objects get a generic interpretation and what the semantic core of their genericity is. Generally, bare plurals have been regarded as having two different interpretations (i.e. generic and existential), and nor only in subject position but in direct object position bare plurals show this difference. There are two kinds of verbs that can have generic bare plural objects (i.e. individual-level predicates and habitual verbs), so proper theory must give an account of generic objects of both kinds of verbs. In this paper, I present two major types of previous approaches that deal with the problem of generic bare plural objects in terms of syntactic information and semantic roles respectively, and I point out each approach has its own problems. Adopting the notion of possible worlds and intensionality as relevant factors, I provide a fundamental explanation about the genericity of bare plural objects. Furthermore, it is also shown that the notion of possible worlds gives us a way to deal with generic objects of individual-level predicates and habitual verbs in a unified way.