A morpho-semantic account of weak definites and bare institutional singulars in English

Weak definites in English have been widely studied as an example of when the definite article doesn’t contribute uniqueness (Aguilar-Guevara & Zwarts 2011; Aguilar-Guevara et al. 2014, among others). I take uniqueness to stem from the interaction between definiteness and number within the noun phrase. From this perspective, weak definites should be seen as a data point situated in the larger cross-literature on number. One particular phenomenon from the literature on number, the understudied class of the English bare institutional singulars (BISs), has been discovered to share several semantic properties with weak definiteness, namely number neutrality, referential deficiency, and lexical idiosyncrasy. In this chapter, I postulate a shared account of English weak definites and BISs that uti- lizes semantic root ambiguity (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998; Levinson 2014) as a way to account for these facts. This account has syntactic consequences that resonate with recent morphosyntactic accounts of number phenomena that argue NumP is the host of number interpretation and marking (Ritter 1991; 1992; 1995) in languages like Amharic, (Kramer 2009), Halkomelem Salish (Wiltschko 2008), and Haitian Creole (Déprez 2005)