The interpretations of coordinated bare nouns in French

In this paper, we will show that the widespread assumption according to which French is a language with no bare nouns is too strong: French does have bare nouns in the form of coordinated bare nouns (CBNs), which must be subdivided into coordinated bare singulars (CBSs) and coordinated bare plurals (CBPs). We will argue that the absence of an overt determiner is licensed, in both cases, by the presence of the conjunction et: the conjunction is able to spell-out a [+Plural] feature, which is crucial for the licensing of bare nouns in the languages discussed (cf. Delfitto & Schroten (1991)). By looking in detail at their interpretational properties, we will show that French CBPs have all the properties associated with non-coordinated BPs as they exist in languages like English and Italian, a fact for which we will try to propose an account.