SEMANTICS OF SINGULAR BARE NOMINALS: ITS REFERENTIAL PROPERTIES

Even though Spanish is a Romance language that has a determiner system, it also allows for the presence of nominals without determiners. Recent literature (Espinal and McNally 2011, Espinal 2010) argues that, whereas bare nominals (BN) denote properties of types of individuals, regular indefinites denote entities. The aim of this article is to explore the manifestation of this semantic distinction in terms of the discourse properties of bare nominals and re gular indefinites. In order to test this, we carried out an experiment which resulted in a corpus of texts written by Native Spanish speakers which included bare nominals and indefinites. Results show that bare nominals and regular indefinites present dissimilar behaviors under different forms in discourse. Such pattern of behavior goes along with the initial hypothesis of the above mention authors who state that BNs are not able to introduce discourse referents, whereas regular indefinites are.