Degraded kind-denoting bare plurals

This paper continues the program of attributing to general principles the behavior of kind-denoting nominals with respect to number and definiteness (Dayal, 2004). I argue that the degradation of Shockley invented ?transistors is due to Transitivity (Hopper Thompson, 1980), which is an improvement upon previous appeals to topicality (Krifka et al., 1995) and null determiners (Oosterhoff, 2008). I further argue that the degradation of My favorite animal is ?dogs is due to the pre-copular nominal being definite and lacking plurality. With that, I advance the determination of the principles which underly the behavior of kind-denoting nominals.