Articles

Dayal's (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare ``singular'' kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare ``singular'' (...) kind terms. A modified theory of kind terms is proposed that accounts for it. The proposed theory puts forth a number system with three basic categories, i.e. singular, plural and general. It is claimed that bare ``singular'' kind terms are in fact derived from general NPs, which are associated with number-neutral properties. The paper also discusses why bare ``singular'' kind terms are not perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentences aren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributing these entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided by some contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.