Weak definites and reference to kinds

Abstract

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.