Articles and bare nominals are often in complementary distribution. English tolerates bare plurals and bare mass nouns (buy apples, drink milk), but not generally bare count singulars (*buy book), except in special configurations like at school, in bed, without anchor), in which the bare nominal is not so much to refer to a concrete individual, but rather to describe properties, types, conventional situations, etc. The use of articles in such weakly referential constructions is often variable within one language (be chair of the committee vs. be a professor), as well as across languages (be a professor - être professeur). The project works out three complementary questions in relation to the distribution and meaning of weakly referential expressions:

(i) weakly referential nominals: lexicon and constructions. Research on classes of nouns and weakly referential configurations.

(ii) Weakly referential nominals: meaning and comprehension. Online/offline experimental investigation on the way in which weakly referential nominals are understood.

(iii) Cross-linguistic distribution of weakly referential nominals. Corpus research on different languages and parallel corpora (English, Romance, Germanic) provides the data for projects (i) and (ii), as well as the generalizations that support information extraction, computer aided translation and natural language processing.

• prof. dr. Henriette de Swart
• dr. Joost Zwarts
• dr. Bert Le Bruyn

• prof. dr. Eric Reuland