The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, April 2nd, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566
Nicolas Poisson (McGill) will be presenting. Abstract is below.
The original Carlsonian claim that bare plurals unambiguously denote kinds received much support from Chierchia (1998), who posited an operator that allows a stage level predicate to combine with a kind to yield an existential reading. The local triggering of this operator explains the apparent ambiguity of bare plurals, that can denote kinds as well as regular properties in existentially quantified sentences. In this talk, we will see that this innocuous principle of composition, called Derived Kind Predication (DKP), as formulated by Chierchia, raises some issues for the composition of stage-level predicates, especially in a taxonomic context. Then we will motivate a parallel composition principle, Direct Object predication, that turns a kind-level predicate into an object-predicate, which compensate for some shortcomings of DKP. We will end the paper by specifying what this operator does and doesn’t do, by discussing some alternatives options to explain the readings it produces.