Earlier work examining bare singular forms of English count nouns has
cursorily suggested that PPs containing these bare NPs (e.g., at school,
at camp, in church) are only interpreted by the NP being used to refer
to a type of institution, not a specific entity (Christophersen 1939,
Hall & Hall 1969, Quirk et al. 1985). While identification of their use
in familiarity implicature argues against bare forms having only
non-referential uses (Stvan 1993, 1998), I propose that there is,
nevertheless, a generic sense that can be conveyed by the use of bare
singulars.
Previous analyses of kind-referring NPs have identified generic uses
associated with several nominal forms: bare plural count nouns (cats),
bare mass nouns (furniture), definite singular count nouns (the cat),
indefinite singular nouns (a cat), proper names (Felis catus), and NPs
with demonstrative determiners (those alley cats), with each type of
kind-referring NP shown to be sensitive to distinct constraints of
semantics, pragmatics, and syntactic distribution (Burton-Roberts 1976,
Carlson 1977a, b, Declerck 1991, Langacker 1991, Krifka et al. 1995,
Bowdle & Ward 1995). Bare singular count nouns as kind-referring NPs
have received much less scrutiny.
Though involving identical forms, familiarity and generic uses differ
concerning the deictic link between the location referent and the
speaker, hearer, or locatum. Used generically, no link is conveyed: in
(1), the highlighted NP refers generically to a set of affected
locations with no located human specified:
(1)
a. An amendment to the Senate's anti-drug bill would have barred alcohol
companies from sponsoring any sort of event on campus.
b. These joint ventures suggest that there are
opportunities in prison for many kinds of companies.
The meanings in (1) remain the same when the bare singular form is
replaced with another NP form associated with generic reference, such as
the bare plural:
(2)
a. An amendment to the Senate's anti-drug bill would have
barred alcohol companies from sponsoring any sort of event on campuses.
b. These joint ventures suggest that there are
opportunities in prisons for many kinds of companies.
In contrast, the familiarity sense, used in (3) to indicate a particular
campus, is only conveyed in situations where the speaker expects the
hearer to identify a campus as the one made salient by being attended by
one of the discourse participants:
(3)
a. Have you been back to campus lately?
b. Which days will he be on campus?
Here, bare plural substitution would be infelicitous, severing the link
between campus and the discourse participant anchor:
(4)
a. #Have you been back to campuses lately?
b. #Which days will he be on campuses?
By examining a corpus of naturally occurring tokens I will show that a
generic reading involving locative PPs depends on the specification of
an individual locatum. I suggest that the discourse context of bare
singular NPs is the source of genericity, not their occurrence in
characterizing sentence types. In short, while the NPs used in
familiarity implicature are individual-referring expressions, generic
uses of bare singular forms are kind-referring NPs.