The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 23, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ
Nicolas Poisson (McGill) will be presenting “A kind of puzzle with the definite determiner.” Here is the abstract:
This talk will present a puzzle in how romance languages refer to kinds using the singular definite determiner. One can show that two expressions with seemingly similar literal meanings (kind X doing Y) don’t give rise to the same reading. The talk will explore the shortcomings of pragmatic explanations for the at-least-two inference of bare plurals (that serves as a basis of comparison for the singular definite determiner) and propose a typology to explain why English and French behave differently regarding kind reference with singular definite determiner.