Weak definites and reference to kinds
By Ana Aguilar‐Guevara, J. Zwarts. 2010
104 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Weak definite NPs do not presuppose the existence of uniquely identifiable entities. In addition, they display a range of other peculiar properties such as sloppy readings in VPs ellipsis, narrow scope interpretations, lexical restrictions and enriched meaning. In order to account for these, in this paper we analyze weak definites as expressions that refer to the same sort of kind individuals that definite generics refer to. We propose that the combination of weak definites with object- level predicates is made possible by a lexical rule that lifts object-level relations to 'enriched' kind-level relations.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de9481aae17d6c85101c47102c717df5e74061bf
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Computational Theory and Mathematics
Citations in the corpus
- Definiteness and determinacy (2015, background): “Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts (2010) give an analysis accommodating this kind of weak definite without abandoning the assumption that the definite article contributes a uniqueness presupposition by invoking kind reference, and Schwarz (2012) offers a slightly different proposal in terms of kinds, also…”
- How weak and how definite are Weak Definites (2012, methodology): “This is not the first proposal of an analysis of Weak Definites based on kinds, as Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts (2011) propose that Weak Definites involve kind reference at the level of the definite noun phrase.”