I argue that common nouns should be analyzed as variables, rather than as predicates which take variables as arguments. This necessitates several unusual features to the analysis, such as allowing variables to be modally non-rigid, and assigning their values compositionally. However, treating common nouns as variables offers a variety of theoretical and empirical advantages over a more traditional analysis: It predicts the conservativity of nominal quantification, simplifies the analysis of articleless languages, derives the weak reading of sentences with donkey anaphora, solves the proportion problem presented by quantifiers like ‘most’, improves the analysis of the temperature paradox, allows a more unified analysis of bare plurals, and regularizes the correspondence between syntactic categories and semantic types.

中文翻译：

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普通名词作为模态非刚性限制变量

我认为普通名词应该作为变量来分析，而不是作为以变量为参数的谓词。这需要分析的几个不同寻常的特征，例如允许变量在模态上是非刚性的，并以组合方式分配它们的值。然而，将普通名词视为变量比更传统的分析提供了多种理论和经验优势：它预测了名词量化的保守性，简化了无冠词语言的分析，导出了带有驴回指的弱读句子，解决了比例问题由“最”等量词呈现，改进了温度悖论的分析，允许对单复数进行更统一的分析，并规范句法类别和语义类型之间的对应关系。