Distributive kind predication

This paper makes two contributions to the study of the interpretation of nominals across Germanic and Romance languages. First, it shows that plural kind terms, such as English bare plurals (e.g., lions) and Italian definite plurals (e.g., i leoni), have definite, non-generic uses in sentences expressing generalizations that were traditionally thought to uniformly involve generic quantification. These non-generic uses explain why the distribution of kind-denoting plurals in sentences expressing generalizations is wider as compared to singular indefinites, which can only appear in generalizations that have a genuinely generic Logical Form (Sects. 3-5). Second, the paper draws on a contrast between English and Italian (and to a minor extent French) plural forms, both bare and definite (Sect. 5). This yields a new approach to the mapping between the form and the interpretation of nominals that combines elements from Chierchia’s (Natural Language Semantics 6:339–405, 1998) and Longobardi’s (Natural Language Semantics 9:335–369, 2001) frameworks. On the approach I present, English bare plurals can alternatively be mapped to kinds or to properties; Italian definite plurals, when not referential, can only be mapped to kinds; and Italian bare plurals only to properties. This explains the behavior of these expressions in a wide number of contexts, most importantly in episodic sentences, which raise puzzles for extant accounts.