Taxonomic Nouns without Reference to Kinds

Nominal constituents of the form that kind of table allow both subkind and existential readings. According to Carlson (1977) both of these readings involve a unique underlying syntactic configuration and a unique denotation for the noun kind. This analysis cannot be extended to the Romanian acest fel de masă ‘this kind of table’, which is fully acceptable and colloquial on the existential reading, but unacceptable (or only marginally accepted by certain speakers) on the subkind reading. My solution to the problem will build on Wilkinson’s (1995) syntactic-ambiguity hypothesis, according to which the existential reading of that kind of table relies on a pseudo-partitive structure. The theoretical contribution of the paper is a new syntactic analysis of the pseudo-partitive structure and a semantic composition corresponding to that structure. The core syntactic assumption will be a null functional head Qual(ity), which carries the burden of the semantic composition. *Fel *‘kind’ itself does not make reference to kind-level objects but rather denotes a second order property. The proposed analysis sheds new light on the existential readings of (the crosslinguistic counterparts of) the English kind and of other taxonomic nouns such as type, model, species.

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