nounbound

Nounbound is a term used in linguistic theory and natural language processing to denote a noun phrase that occurs without a determiner, numeral, or other element that would typically bound its reference. The concept is used to discuss how nouns can be interpreted with varying degrees of referential specificity across languages and contexts. In English and many other languages, bare noun phrases (also called bare nouns or zero-article phrases) can function as subjects or predicates without an explicit determiner: for example, dogs bark, water boils. In these cases the noun is said to be nounbound because its reference is not bound by a determiner; the intended referent can be generic or contextually determined.

The term also helps distinguish between bound noun phrases, which carry explicit definiteness or quantity markers (the dog, two dogs), and nounbound phrases that rely on discourse context for reference. The interpretation of nounbound expressions can vary by language: languages with zero articles or flexible article systems often exhibit nounbound usage in headlines, proverbs, or topical references.

In implementation terms, nounbound status can influence natural language processing tasks such as syntactic parsing, anaphora resolution, and machine translation, where determiner presence affects agreement, translation choices, or entailment relations. The label remains descriptive rather than universally standardized, and some scholars may prefer terms like bare noun or zero-article noun to describe similar phenomena.

Further reading: bare noun, zero article, definiteness, determiner.