In this talk, I motivate and develop an explicit, formal semantics for the construction of subkinds in natural language. The primary data come from the manifestations of Bolinger's Contrast across languages. After establishing that adjectival modification structures are instances of kind modification, I contend that what lies beneath the (cross-linguistically robust and stable) contrast is the demarcation between well-established subkinds (WEKs) and ad hoc subkinds (AHKs). Although both WEKs and AHKs are grammatically relevant means to constructing subkinds from kinds, the former name institutionalized, pre-established subkinds with distinguishing properties, while the latter are used to impute to the kinds under discussion some contextually imposed-upon properties and to construct subkinds in an ad hoc way. In the talk, I will offer a partition-based, compositional semantics for subkind reference and discuss its theoretical and empirical implications.
About the speaker : Qiongpeng Luo is a Professor of Linguistics at the School of Liberal Arts, Nanjing University. His research areas include formal semantics and syntax-semantics interface. He is visiting the Department of Linguistic and Nordic Studies of UiO under a Norwegian-Chinese Government Exchange Fellowship.