A Note on Taxonomic Nouns and their Reference

Taxonomic nouns like kind, type, and sort appear to refer to abstract entities, rather than particular objects. Focusing on the Romanian tip ‘type’, we provide evidence based on agreement patterns in favor of Wilkinson’s (1995) hypothesis that the two interpretations—taxonomic and existential— of taxonomic nouns correspond to distinct syntactic structures. We propose a formal analysis of existential readings employing a pseudo-partitive syntax with an intransitive-predicate denotation for the taxonomic noun. Our analysis clarifies the distinction between genuine taxonomic Ns, including tip ‘type’, which refer to abstract entities, and the Romanian noun fel ‘kind’, which seems unable to do so. We show that despite lexical variety, a unified treatment of taxonomic expressions remains viable without multiplying abstract entity sorts beyond Carlsonian kinds. Our proposal accommodates the syntactic diagnostics while avoiding unnecessary ontological commitments.