Proceedings of the 13 ESSLLI Student Session - Multiple Choices ...

that kinds are not restricted to plants or animals but may involve things as diverse as bottles,
chairs, ... in as far as they show a sufficiently regular behaviour (see 4.1).
The second prediction my claim about non-bare predication and kind-membership makes
is that bare predication should be concerned with the predication of properties that are unlike
those that link a kind to its instantiations. In view of the non-accidentality constraint
on kinds and their instantiations (see 4.1) it is then predicted that bare predication is concerned
with accidental properties. To see that this is exactly what happens it is instructive
to look at those nouns that usually appear in bare predication: nouns linked to professions,
religions, nationalities and titles. These ”do not depend on the inherent, natural properties
of a person or what the person actually does, but on the social or cultural status of that
person” (de Swart et al., 2007).
The third prediction is that whenever a noun that is usually associated with kinds is used
in bare predication it is reinterpreted in such a way that it no longer predicates a nonaccidental
property. An example was given in (14): being a wolf in (14) is an accidental
property that comes with the distribution of roles in a game.
The fourth prediction is that whenever a noun that is usually not associated with kinds
is used in non-bare predication it is reinterpreted in such a way that it starts predicating
non-accidental properties. An example was given in (13b): for Sil to be a butcher is no
longer seen as an accidental property but rather as something that is linked to his inherent
properties. This explains why Sil needn’t be a butcher by profession to make (13b) true.
The fifth prediction is that whenever it is not clear whether something is an accidental
property or not there is variation in the predication that is used. One telling example is
that of diseases like alcoholism. According to some alcoholism is a disease that people
may or may not get, according to others alcoholics are themselves responsible and are
not sick in the classical meaning of the word. Interestingly this division is reflected in the
use of the more clinical alcoholieker (Dutch, ’alcoholic’) and the more popular drinker
(Dutch, ’drinker’). On google I found the former 43 times in bare predication and 8 times
in non-bare predication whereas the latter appeared 364 times in non-bare predication and
only 6 times in bare predication. 1
5 Conclusion
Proceedings of the 13 th ESSLLI Student Session
This paper started out as an investigation into the role of the indefinite article in predicate
position. The analysis I defended is that through its competition with the bare form it
marks non-uniqueness which in turn can be linked to kind-membership predication. This
analysis is attractive in at least three respects. The first is that the indefinite article maintains
its standard semantics and pragmatics and is not reduced to a vacuous item. The
second is that it offers a formalizable alternative to temporal analyses that were shown to
make wrong predictions. The third is that it brings together intuitions and claims from
work on kinds and work on bare predication that lend themselves to an interesting remix.
1 The google search was done on www.google.nl (restricted to Dutch pages) and concerned searches of
the form ”is drinker” / ”is alcoholieker”.
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