Reference to singular kinds in Germanic and Romance
Samuel Jambrović
June 2023 

The need for the definite article to express a singular kind (the cat) in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer’s (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia’s (1998) “down” operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds (rice) and to DivPs to derive plural kinds (cats), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia proposes for plural kinds in Romance, where the definite article returns a maximal individual that can be intensionalized into a kind. In articleless languages like Mandarin, this account allows for a universal property-denoting denotation of nP and simultaneously captures the fact that singular kinds have the same distribution as mass kinds.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007864 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2023 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association
keywords:	kinds, bare nouns, mass nouns, count nouns, plurality, singularity, determiners, definiteness, maximality, type-shifting, predicates, arguments, roots, lexical decomposition, distributed morphology, germanic, romance, mandarin, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [February 2024]
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