ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of views on reference to properties in natural language and presents so far unnoticed semantic restrictions on explicit property-referring terms of the sort the property of being wise. Those restrictions indicate that the ontology of natural language involves a notion of a property distinct from both the notion of an abundant property (content of a predicate) and a sparse or natural property, and moreover that that notion must be on a par with universal grammar in Chomsky's sense, as it could hardly have been acquired from exposure to data or imported from philosophy.
