The Generic BookGregory N. Carlson, Francis Jeffry Pelletier In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. |
Contents
STAGELEVel and IndividualLevel | 125 |
INDIVIDUALLEVEL PREDICATES AS INHERENT | 176 |
FOCUS AND the INTERPRETATION | 238 |
Indefinites Adverbs of QUANTIFICATION | 265 |
WHAT SOME GENERIC SENTENCES MEAN | 300 |
SEMANTIC CONSTRAINTS ON TYPESHIFTING | 339 |
GENERIC INFORMATION AND DEPENDENT | 358 |
THE SEMANtics of the COMMON NOun Kind | 383 |
A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS | 398 |
THE MARKING of the EpisodicGENERIC | 412 |
| 427 | |
| 451 | |
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Common terms and phrases
adverb adverb of quantification analysis analyzed anaphora antecedent approach assume bare plural Bermuda Triangle bird Carlson characterizing sentences Consider context count nouns D-structure defeasible defeasible reasoning definite denote derived discussion distinction domain donkey entailment entities episodic example existential closure existential quantifier existential reading express fact focus function GEN-operator Heim i-level predicates indefinite descriptions indefinite NPs individual individual-level predicates interpretation introduced John kind predicates kind-referring NPs knows French Kratzer Krifka language lexical linguistic lion Logical Form Mary smokes mass nouns meaning Modus Ponens nonmonotonic normal notion noun phrases nuclear scope operator Pelletier plural NPs possible worlds propositions Q-adverbs quantifier refer relation representation restrictive clause restrictor rhino Robert Musil rules Schubert singular situation stage-level predicates stative structure syntactic taxonomic tense theory tiger tion true Tweety type-shifting typical unaccusative universal quantifier usually variable verb verbal predicate