Definiteness in Russian bare nominal kinds

In the literature on generic nominal reference, it is usually pointed out that in Russian, both singular and plural nominal expressions can have a generic reference (Chierchia 1998; Doron 2003; Dayal 2004). The main contribution of this article is to propose an explicit analysis for composing definite kinds from bare nominals in this language. We provide independent empirical support for the definiteness of apparent bare nominals in argument position of kind-level predicates and argue that definiteness is to be associated with a null D(eterminer), interpreted as the iota operator. The general hypothesis we defend is that definite kinds, even in a language without articles such as Russian, encode definiteness semantically and syntactically