This paper is concerned with the conditions under which token reference to individuals comes about on the one hand and type reference to the whole kind of an entity is rendered on the other. The author considers how the process of reference comes about with nouns inherently denoting mass concepts and with nouns denoting countable concepts. He exemplifies the interpretation of np readings with a rule component which has been implemented in the machine translation system cat2. Out of these np readings those articles are to be generated which are in accordance with the language-specific conventions.