Numberless kinds: Evidence from Russian

Abstract

As is well-known from both descriptive and formally oriented literature, kind referring nominal phrases in Russian can appear in both morphologically singular and plural forms (Chierchia 1998; Doron 2003; Dayal 2004). The main contribution of this article is to argue that morphologically singular kind expressions are, in fact, numberless nominal phrases. In other words, we will argue that the best way to analyse these expressions, which we refer to as definite kinds, following the terminology of Borik & Espinal (2012, 2015), is by representing them as lacking both syntactic and semantic Number. We base our analysis on the theoretical postulate that, semantically, Number can be viewed as a Realization Operator converting properties of kinds into properties of objects, and that definite kinds do not activate such an operator whatsoever. We show how the analysis we propose for definite kinds can be extended to explain the peculiarities of the word order found in modified kind expressions in Russian.

Keywords

• kind reference
• number
• Russian