We are happy to announce a talk by Agata Renans (Bochum) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: November 20, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Bare singular and plural kinds: Kind formation across languages
Abstract:
Languages with a singular-plural and mass-count distinction as well as overt definite and indefinite determiners are predicted not to allow bare singular kinds (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004). Ga (Kwa) is such a language (Campbell 2017; Renans 2016a,b, 2018, 2021) and yet both bare singular and plural count nouns can obtain a kind reading: while bare plural form is preferred for entities that are frequently encountered by the Ga speakers, bare singular form is preferred for rarely encountered entities. Moreover, definite NPs can never obtain the kind reading. Thus the Ga data point to a new mechanism of kind formation and to a previously unattested variation in kind formation across languages: while in languages like English the kind-forming operator makes use of the supremum (Chierchia 1998), in languages like Ga the kind-forming operator encodes a sum.