On kinds and anaphoricity in languages without definite articles

This paper investigates the availability of anaphoric readings with bare nouns in
languages without definite articles, with a special focus on kind-level interpretation.
Various facts from Serbian, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Hindi shows
that the anaphoric reading of bare nouns is constrained by two general factors: (i)
number morphology; in particular, whether the language in question has number
morphology to begin with, and if it does, whether the bare noun in question is mass
or count, and (ii) kind interpretation. It seems that mass and plural nouns can have
anaphoric readings only if they are not interpreted as kinds. Singular count bare
nouns, on the other hand, do not seem to be restricted in this way: they can have
anaphoric readings regardless of whether or not they are interpreted as kinds. I argue
that this state of affairs naturally follows from the system developed in Dayal
(2004), which is based on a limited set of type-shifting operations and a particular
analysis of number morphology. Alternative approaches to interpretation of bare
nouns, on the other hand, do not seem to directly predict this sort of variation and
require additional assumptions to account for it.