Plural definites and domain restriction in Romance and Germanic

Abstract

Across Romance and Germanic languages, plural definites either have the three following uses, or none of them. (a) They can refer to the maximal plural individual satisfying the description, without being anaphoric or contextually restricted; (b) They can serve as arguments of kind predicates; (c) they can be generic and enter the restrictor of a modal adverb of quantification like ‘usually’ (and its counterpart in other languages). We use compatibility with ‘usually’ as a test for genericity, because even non-generic referential plural definites (say [The NPs] in English) can restrict some adverbs of quantification, including ‘generally’, an often overlooked fact. The relationship between (b) and (c) has been observed, but their connection with (a) has gone unnoticed, and our generalization, to our knowledge, has never been formulated as such. Our goal is to substantiate it and to show that it sheds a new light on the cross-linguistic comparison of Romance and Germanic languages regarding genericity, bare plurals, and plural definites. We conclude the paper by fitting existential readings of Italian and English Bare Plurals into the picture.