No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

A waiter notices that a diner who ordered a ham sandwich has just stormed out of the restaurant, and calls to his colleague:(1) The ham sandwich left without paying! Some diners are discussing what each person ate, and one of them elaborates:(2) Bill was a ham sandwich.In these scenarios, (1) is used to communicate that the customer who ordered the ham sandwich left without paying, and (2) is used to communicate that Bill ate a ham sandwich. However, on their most straightforward interpretations, (1) and (2) do not semantically express these propositions. These sentences exemplify meaning transfer. 1 For now, we won't try to characterise what meaning transfer is more precisely, but we'll assume that the phenomenon exhibited by the above cases is recognisable, and that the envisioned utterances of (1) and (2) are uncontroversial instances of this phenomenon.Slightly more controversially, we will assume that (in the scenarios described) it is the predicate which undergoes meaning transfer in (2), while in (1) it is the subject-term. 2 We will return to clarify and support these assumptions later.As attested in the literature, meaning transfer interests a variety of theorists across a variety of disciplines. 3 However, a number of key issues about its nature remain underexplored. It deserves more attention than it has received.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.