Abstract:It has sometimes been proposed that generic sentences make statements about prototypic members of a category. In this paper I will elaborate this view and develop an account where generic sentences express quantification about the normal exemplars in a categoryhere and in counterf.actual worlds sufficiendy similar to our own.Comparing the account to the currendy most widespread analysis which views generic sentences as universal quantifications in carefully chosen best-possible worlds, we find that an analysis… Show more
“…An objection to the normal worlds approach, found in Eckhardt (; cf. also Cohen, ; Krifka et al , p. 56), runs as follows: …one might ask how speakers can acquire this kind of sophisticated knowledge about counterfactual worlds.…”
Section: Normality Theoriesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Generic beliefs should be the result of “[speakers'] desire to understand and characterise the world immediately surrounding them” (Pelletier & Asher, : 1129), yet the “normal case in the world immediately surrounding one” seems to be deeply hidden [on the normal worlds approach]. ( Eckhardt, , p. 241).At heart, the problem is that the more complex one makes the notion of normality to account for different kinds of exceptions, the further the normal worlds get from the actual world. A world devoid of mutations, accidents, and abnormalities is completely different from the actual world.…”
This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.
“…An objection to the normal worlds approach, found in Eckhardt (; cf. also Cohen, ; Krifka et al , p. 56), runs as follows: …one might ask how speakers can acquire this kind of sophisticated knowledge about counterfactual worlds.…”
Section: Normality Theoriesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Generic beliefs should be the result of “[speakers'] desire to understand and characterise the world immediately surrounding them” (Pelletier & Asher, : 1129), yet the “normal case in the world immediately surrounding one” seems to be deeply hidden [on the normal worlds approach]. ( Eckhardt, , p. 241).At heart, the problem is that the more complex one makes the notion of normality to account for different kinds of exceptions, the further the normal worlds get from the actual world. A world devoid of mutations, accidents, and abnormalities is completely different from the actual world.…”
This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.
“…dogs which have some mutation, have undergone an accident, etc. (Asher & Morreau 1995;Pelletier & Asher 1997;McCarthy 1986;Drewery 1997;Eckardt 1999).…”
Section: The Semantics and Pragmatics Of Is And Bp Generics 31 The mentioning
This paper attempts to clarify nature of the "law-likness" or "nonaccidentalness" that generic sentences are usually claimed to express. It does so by examining the interactions of such generic sentences with a construction which seems to express "accidentalness," namely the happens to construction (as in John happens not to see well). In particular, it turns out that generics with bare plural subjects (BP generics, like Dogs have four legs), but not generics with indefinite singular subjects (IS generics, like A dog has four legs) are compatible with this construction (compare Dogs happen to have four legs vs #A dog happens to have four legs). I analyze happens to as a domain vague necessity operator, i.e. a universal quantifier over worlds, whose restriction (the domain of worlds quantified over) is systematically vague. Following Greenberg (2003Greenberg ( , 2008 I propose that a number of distributional and interpretational differences between IS and BP generics can be attributed to the fact that although both have the same basic modal quantificational semantic structure the restriction over worlds is necessarily precise in the former kind of generics but is allowed to be vague in the latter. The compatibility of BP generics with happens to is thus analyzed as a case of modal concord.
“…Generic sentences raise a particular problem, since there is no consensus as to their logical form (see (Asher and Morreau 1995, Eckardt 1999, Cohen 1999, Greenberg 2002) for some recent proposals). If we assume that generic sentences have an implicative form in the scope of some variant of a 2-operator, they are licensed by either domain shift or conceptual dependency or by both.…”
Fresh evidence from Free Choice Items (FCIs) in French question the current perception of the class. The role of some standard distinctions found in the literature is weakened or put in a new perspective. The distinction between universal and existential is no longer an intrinsic property of FCIs. Similarly, the opposition between variation-based vs intension-based analyses is relativized. We show that the regime of free choiceness can be characterized by an abstract constraint, that we call Non Individuation (NI), and which can be satisfied in different ways that match current distinctions. NI says that the information conveyed by a sentence containing a FCI should not be reducible to a referential situation, that is a situation in which particular individuals satisfy the sentence in the current world. The widely used resource of modal variation becomes a particular scenario of free-choiceness, not its 'essence'. In fact, we show that under certain conditions, FCIs can occur in episodic, non modal, sentences, a fact that NI can accommodate. We also discuss more fine-grained aspects of the semantics of FCIs, such as their emotional colour.
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