 The sentence pairs above are prima facie syntactically parallel—both are subject-predicate sentences whose subjects consist of the same common noun coupled with the same, or no, article. However, the interpretation of first sentence of each pair is intuitively quite different from the interpretation of the second sentence in the pair. In the second sentences, we are talking about some particular tigers: a group of tigers in  (1b),  some individual tiger in  (2b),  and some unique salient or familiar tiger in  (3b)—a  beloved pet, perhaps. In the first sentences, however, we are saying something general. There is/are no particular tiger or tigers that we are talking about.