Chinese bare nouns have multiple referential possibilities,and there is a sig-nificant and systematic co-occurrence pattern between the referential semantics of bare nouns in subject position and the modal environment in which they are located.The specific laws are as follows:prototype bare noun subjects expressing generic reference have to be in Irrea-lis modality,while the prototype bare noun subjects expressing definite reference have to be in Realis.The generic-definite reading continuum of bare noun subjects comes along with ir-realis-realis syntactic context continuum.There is an interactive relationship between refer-ence and modality.On reference study,great importance should be attached to modal con-text of sentences,so that many difficult problems will be solved.
bare noun subjectsdefinite/generic referencemodalityrealis/irrealis
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
