Semantics of Turkish bare nouns and the function of classifiers

The issue of what bare nouns denote is particularly relevant in studies of classifier constructions, given that a classifier serves to mediate the relation between a numeral and a noun. This study addresses the semantics of Turkish bare nouns within the context of numeral classifiers and kind terms, and demonstrates, in line with the ambiguity view, that they are globally ambiguous between object and kind readings, and that the role of classifiers and kind terms is to restrict the domain of entities to object and kind individuals respectively. The analysis developed is further shown to account for a wide range of interpretive possibilities associated with bare nouns in Turkish.