Part of
Edges, Heads, and Projections: Interface propertiesEdited by Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Virginia Hill
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 156] 2010
► pp. 23–46
The central observation in this paper is that bare nouns display an ambiguous interpretation only under coordination. Adopting a strict syntax-semantic mapping, this paper focuses on this property and argues that the ambiguity follows from the level of complexity of the left periphery: plural and mass bare nouns have different readings according to whether their edge is low (i.e., PropP) or high (i.e., QP).