Abstract
The standard versions of predicativism are committed to the following two theses: (1) proper names are count nouns in all their (literal) occurrences (the syntactic aspect of predicativism), and (2) names do not refer to objects but express (non-relational) name-bearing properties (the semantic aspect of predicativism). The main motivation for predicativism is to provide a uniform explanation of referential names and predicative names. According to predicativism, predicative names are fundamental and referential names are explained by appealing to a null determiner functioning like “the” or “that.” This paper has two goals. The first is to reject the predicativists’ explanation of the two types of names. I present three syntactic counterexamples to the predicativists’ account of referential names: incorporation, modification, and measure phrase uses. The second goal is to present a novel strategy to explain the two types of names. I propose that referential names are fundamental but that there are null morphemes available for transforming a name into a count noun (and possibly into other syntactic categories).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful conversations and comments on this paper, I thank Betul Erbasi, Frank Hong, Robin Jeshion, Elli Neufeld, Jeff Russell, Barry Schein, Scott Soames, Haley Wei, Alexis Wellwood, and the anonymous referees and editors for this journal. I also thank the audiences at the 2018 Pacific APA meeting and at the 4th Philosophy of Language and Mind Conference at Ruhr University Bochum, where I presented earlier versions of this paper, for helpful discussions.
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Lee, J. On the asymmetry between names and count nouns: syntactic arguments against predicativism. Linguist and Philos 43, 277–301 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09273-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09273-8