Abstract
As an exception to Krifka’s (in: Bartsch, Benthem, Emde Boas,Semantics and contextual expression, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1989) famous generalization that a quantized incremental theme always induces an event-homomorphic completive reading, Singh (Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17(1): 469–479, 1991, Journal of East Asian Linguistics 3(2): 107–146, 1998) observes that in Hindi only quantized mass noun phrases entail a completive reading, but unexpectedly quantized count noun phrases can give rise to an incompletive reading. She proposes that count nouns can introduce a partial-affectedness thematic relation, whereas mass nouns introduce a total-affectedness thematic relation. With new data in Mandarin, instead of the count/mass distinction, I argue that referentiality of the direct object is a crucial factor, because incompletive readings are only felicitous with direct objects interpreted referentially for consumption verbs in Mandarin.
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