‘Non-standard’ arguments: Kinds, properties, and incorporation

Abstract. This paper closely tracks the behavior of non-standard arguments, i.e. ‘bare’ or ‘small’ NPs that have been argued in the literature to be kind denoting. It focuses on their aspectual and scope properties, exposing some key differences between plurals, singulars and so called ‘weak definites’. The core data are largely, though not wholly, familiar and English based, but they are systematically compared with their counterparts in the Romance languages and in articleless languages like Hindi, in the hope of arriving at a crosslinguistically viable approach. The outcome is a novel take on kind-level predication (one that eschews what has come to be knows as ‘Derived Kind Predication’) and also a partially novel take on the semantics of (pseudo-)incorporation.