The Magic of the Generic: A Critique of the Studies on Generic Sentences (original) (raw)
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C. in his article The Institutional Use of "The" makes a clear distinction between an individual concept (an elephant) and its kind (the Elephant). He argues that while an elephant or a bird hints at an individual entity, the "The" we are dealing with institutionalizes these concepts. Drawing strength from the linguistic practice of "The" preceding names of institutions (The Statesman for instance), Langford"s thesis seeks to make clear demarcation between the properties of an individual element and that of the "institution" or, in our terms, the kind. In an attempt to define the relationship between the individual and the kind, Langford resorts to the notions of intrinsic and extrinsic relational properties. In a set of elements (eg. the Elephant) if the property K is shared by all the individual elements, then the property should be defined as the intrinsic property of that set (read kind) or else the property is extrinsic. In the set of all real numbers, for instance, if the property of being a real number is marked by R then R is the intrinsic property of the set. Now, in the same set, there are numbers that are multiples of 2 and the property of being a multiple of two may be named M. This M is intrinsic to those multiples but not an intrinsic property of the whole set. This M is an extrinsic property. What Wilfrid Sellars names "distributive singular" (Sellars 1963) does not put Langford in trouble in any substantial way. Sellars shows that a reference to kind does not necessarily call for an institutional "The". Sentences with distributive singular subjects, such as "Man is mortal", fare quite well without Langford"s determiner and may still be institutionalised. These singulars are distributive as although they refer to a "one" (a particular kind) they may be reduced to "manys" (a kind includes members sharing similar properties). Speculations on whether or not this is immediately reminiscent of Badiou"s concern about "one" as "count-as-one" (Badiou 2005) should be kept at bay for the time being. But what must be stated in clear terms is that Langford"s thesis was less concerned about the determiner than the dichotomy of reference to a kind and a definite entity. He certainly proposed that "The" institutionalizes instances/ individuals but was far from concluding that it was the only way. The "distributive singular" expands Langford"s horizon rather than undoing it. Sellars (1963) marks his distinction most prominent by introducing the idea of "abstract entities" or distributive entities. The claim that kinds are sets of instances or mere institutionalization of real "pieces" is refuted. Let us consider the following sentences cited in Sellars" article as foundations on which his argument stands:
Handbook of experimental semantics and pragmatics, 2019
'Birds fly', 'The fox is a sly animal', and 'A cat lands on its feet' are all generic generaliza tions that allow speakers to talk about kinds of entities rather than individuals and to re fer to their characteristic or essential properties. Their complex yet fundamental nature has attracted the interest of linguists and philosophers of language since the 1970s while they have also recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and devel opmental psychologists. The two main approaches to genericity in two different fields, formal semantics and cognitive psychology, are discussed. The review of the experimental research on the topic reveals that while the experimental study of generics is still in its early stages, interdisciplinary work that integrates the tools and perspectives of both strands of investigation can substantially advance our understanding of the topic.
Lingua, 2011
This study examines NPs in generic environments cross-linguistically. According to the semantic literature, NPs obtain generic readings from two sources: characterizing sentences (Lions are dangerous) and kind-reference (Dodo birds are extinct). English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are known to differ in the types of NPs (definite vs. indefinite; singular vs. plural) that are allowed in the two types of environments, but there is disagreement in the literature concerning (i) the status of bare (article-less) NPs in generic environments in Brazilian Portuguese; and (ii) whether singular and/or plural generics are restricted to canonical kinds cross-linguistically. The broader goal of this paper is to use experimental methodology to resolve these disagreements; the more specific goal is to test the theoretical proposal of Dayal (2004), which makes testable predictions for the distribution of generic NPs cross-linguistically. The results of Acceptability Judgment Tasks with native speakers of English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese provide support for Dayal's proposal that plural generics cross-linguistically denote kinds, while definite singular generics denote taxonomic entities. These findings highlight the value of experimentally testing the predictions of semantic theories, and pose questions for further research.
Conceptual and linguistic distinctions between singular and plural generics
2009
hypothesize that 'bare plural' generics (e.g. "tigers are striped") are used to express a range of conceptually different types of generalizations. We investigate whether different syntactic forms of generics are restricted to expressing only some of these types of generalizations, and if so, which ones. In doing so, we also test the relationship between Prasada and Dillingham's categories of generalizations on the one hand, and Leslie's on the other. The findings have significant consequences for our understanding of the conceptual mechanisms that underlie generics and our ability to think generally about kinds.
Generics: some (non) specifics
Synthese, 2021
This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.
Theory-based considerations influence the interpretation of generic sentences
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2010
Under what circumstances do people agree that a kind-referring generic sentence (e.g., ‘Swans are beautiful’) is true? We hypothesised that theory-based considerations are sufficient, independently of prevalence/frequency information, to lead to acceptance of a generic statement. To provide evidence for this general point, we focused on demonstrating the impact of a specific theory-based, essentialist expectation – that the physical features characteristic of a biological kind emerge as a natural product of development – on participants’ reasoning about generics. Across three studies, adult participants (N=99) confirmed our hypothesis, preferring to map generic sentences (e.g., ‘Dontrets have long tails’) onto novel categories for which the key feature (e.g., long tails) was absent in all the young but present in all the adults rather than onto novel categories for which the key feature was at least as prevalent but present in some of the young and in some of the adults. Control conditions using ‘some’- and ‘most’-quantified sentences demonstrated that this mapping is specific to generic meaning. These results suggest that generic meaning does not reduce to quantification and is sensitive to theory-based expectations.
Oxford University Press, 2012
Long overview of current theories of genericity: NP, VP and types of generic sentences.
Generics Are a Cognitive Default: Evidence From Sentence Processing
Cognitive Science, 2011
Generics Are a Cognitive Default: Evidence From Sentence Processing Meredith Meyer (mermeyer@umich.edu), Susan A. Gelman (gelman@umich.edu), and Sarah M. Stilwell (stilwell@umich.edu) Department of Psychology, 530 Church Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043 USA Abstract sentence Dogs have four legs as Most dogs have four legs, sets quantified by most similarly do not equate to the referents of generics. Consider, for instance, that although Sharks attack swimmers is often judged as acceptable, Most sharks attack swimmers is not. Generics are thus not reducible to quantifiers conveying statistical prevalence (e.g., Cimpian, Gelman, & Brandone, 2010). Noting these sorts of distinctions, most semantic analyses impute qualitative differences between generic and quantified reference (Carlson, 2010; Leslie, 2008) and reject earlier quantificational analyses treating generics as if they contained implicit quantification (e.g., Clark, 1973). Generics instead are kind-referring (Carlson, 2010), a...
Genericity from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Linguistics, 2005
In this article, I will investigate genericity from a cross-linguistic perspective. After discussing some methodological and theoretical problems involved in this task, I will present a multidimensional approach, arguing that it is necessary to factor apart di¤erent types of information involved in the notion of genericity. In the empirical part, generic marking and interpretation in the nominal domain will be analyzed in terms of this approach for five languages: English, German, French, Hungarian, and Greek. As a result, I will claim a fundamental typological di¤erence between QUALITYmarking languages (English) and DISCOURSE REFERENT-marking languages (French, Hungarian, Greek), with German representing a mixed type between the two.
Genericity is easy? Formal and Experimental Perspectives
In this paper, we compare the formal semantics approach to genericity, within which genericity is viewed as a species of quantification, and a growing body of experimental and developmental work on the topic, mainly by psychologists rather than linguists, proposing that genericity is categorically different from (and significantly simpler than) quantification. We argue that this generics-as-default hypothesis is much less well supported by evidence than its supporters contend, and that a research program combining theoretical and experimental research methods and considerations in the same studies is required to make progress.