On Referential and Kind-Denoting Plurals

Abstract

English bare plurals and Italian definite plurals are considered kind-denoting as they support kind predication, as in ‘lions are extinct’. In this work, I argue that tools used for referential plurals, such as the distributive operator DIST, should be extended to kind-denoting plurals. This is compatible with the standard view of kinds as as intensional sums (Chierchia, 1998). As a result, at least three distributional puzzles fall in line. Unlike singular indefinites, kind- denoting plurals: (i) are compatible with both contingent and law-like generalizations (Lawler, 1973; Greenberg, 2002), (ii) support cumulative predication (Nickel, 2008; Kirkpatrick, 2022), and (iii) can exhibit near-universal force in non-generic contexts (Condoravdi, 1994; Dayal, 2004).
Given the advantages of this view, a question comes up of why referential plurals and kind-denoting plurals have different distributions. In this connection, I present a generalization from joint work with Benjamin Spector, showing that there is a systematic cross-linguistic link between whether a definite expression can have maximal domain restriction and whether it can denote a kind.

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