How universal is the Universal Grinder

In this paper we investigate the interpretation of the bare noun in the Mandarin sentence in (1a) and the consequences it has for the semantic denotation of mass nouns and count nouns in the lexicon. The sentence in (1a) has what we would like to call the “wall-paper reading”: it is only felicitous to describe a situation in which a wall has been decorated with numerous little dogs. The noun gǒu ‘dog’ does not have a mass reading. Note that for the mass reading we need gǒu-rou ‘dog flesh/ meat’ (in (1b)). Note also, that a bare mass noun like shuǐ ‘water’ is perfect in these sentences (see (1c)).