Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

While the general strategies for creating kind-denoting noun phrases in different languages have been well explored since the seminal work of Carlson (1977), Chierchia (1998) and Dayal (2004), areas of uncertainty remain with respect to the domain of quantification over subkinds as well as the precise conditions in which one can form kinds out of properties, or vice versa refer to individuals merely as representatives of their own kind. At the same time, kinds are being increasingly used as a common meaning platform for basic noun meaning and noun adjective-interaction (McNally & Boleda 2004), with ramifications into computational semantics (McNally,2015, McNally&Boleda, 2015), while event kinds have been proposed for the meaning of -ing forms (Grimm & McNally, to appear) and certain abstract terms (Moltmann, 2013). 

In this talk I will give an overview of what a general theory of (sub)kinds might look like, and discuss the interaction between syntax, semantics and general cognition in kind nominals, focusing on English and Italian-type languages.