A cross-linguistic study on kind-denoting noun phrases

Abstract

Although kind concepts have generally been assumed to be universal in the cognition of human beings, kind-related expressions vary considerably across languages. This thesis focuses on kind-denoting noun phrases which refer to categories as ‘kinds’ rather than as sets of individuals. Drawing upon data from six languages as typological representatives, this study proposes a unified analysis on how nouns are mapped to kind terms from the lexicon, and how the differences among these languages can be reduced to a small number of differences in which ways the language makes use of. Different from Carlsonian’s kind-referring analysis (Carlson 1977, etc.) and the ambiguity approach (Wilkinson 1991, etc.), both of which hold basically that bare NPs in the lexicon have a semantic nature of denoting kinds, it is claimed that nominal roots in the lexicon denote properties but not kinds by themselves. Kinds are derived via two ways of shifting from the nominal roots, resulting in two types of kind-denoting NPs: atomic kinds and sum kinds. Nominal roots can be shifted to atomic kinds directly by an iota shifter. This analysis captures the fact that bare forms are generally preferred by natural languages and the shifting from the lexicon to kinds can be done covertly. Sum kinds are achieved via a down-shifting from sets of individuals, with an individuation process involved. The former shifting results in a singular form, whereas the latter are often represented in plural forms. Based on the analysis of nominal roots, and the generalization on the complementary relation between number morpheme and classifiers, a formal representation of plurality and classification as two aspects of individuation is proposed. Following the spirit of Borer (2005) and others, this study argues to add an individuation projection to the DP structure, which uniformly captures the semantic shifting and syntactic transformations of kind-denoting noun phrases (as well as some other types of nominals). The core spirit of the new DP structure is that lexical roots denote intensional properties and need to go an individuation process before being counted. The plural/singular distinction on kind terms can be reduced to a small difference on whether or not the nominal roots undergo individuation process. The theory suggested integrates with the Mapping Hypothesis and the existing observations regarding to kind-related terms, counting, and bare NPs. The investigation into kind-denoting nouns also sheds new light on the type-shifting theory. It is suggested that the two pairs of mappings between e and <e, t> (down/up, iota/ident) should be distinguished carefully, and it is generally disfavored to do round-way shifting in a single mapping process.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Haihua PAN (Supervisor)