Genericity

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-969181-4
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, Band 43, 458 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 690 g

Reihe: Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics and pursues the enterprise of the influential Generic Book edited by Gregory Carlson and Jeffry Pelletier, which was published in 1995. Genericity is a key notion in the study of human cognition as it reveals our capacity to organize our perceived reality into classes and to describe regularities. The generic can be expressed at the level of a word or phrase (ie the potato in The Irish economy became dependent upon the potato) or an entire sentence (eg in John smokes a cigar after dinner, the generic aspect is a property of the expression, rather than any single word or phrase within it). This book gathers new work from senior and young researchers to reconsider the notion of genericity, examining the distinct contributions made by the determiner phrase (eg the notions of kind/individual) and the verbal predicate (eg the notions of permanency, disposition, ability, habituality, and plurality). Finally, in connection with the whole sentence, the analytic/synthetic distinction is discussed as well as the notion of normality. The book will appeal to both students and scholars in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science

Zielgruppe

Students and researchers in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mari, Alda

Beyssade, Claire

Del Prete, Fabio

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1: Alda Mari, Claire Beyssade, and Fabio Del Prete: Introduction
2: Carmen Dobrovic-Sorin: Generic Plural and Mass Indefinites
3: Bert Le Bruyn, Min Que, and Henriëtte de Swart: The Scope of Bare Nominals
4: Stefan Hinterwimmer: Free Relatives as Kind Denoting Terms
5: Gerhard Schaden: Two Ways of 'Referring to Generalities' in German
6: Nora Boneh and Edit Doron: Hab and Gen in the Expression of Habituality
7: Patricia Cabredo Hofherr: Bare Habituals and Singular Indefinites
8: Fabio Del Prete: Imperfectivity and Habituality in Italian
9: Anastasia Giannakidou and Eleni Staraki: Ability, Action, and Causation: From pure abilty to force
10: Paula Menédez-Benito: On Dispositional Sentences
11: Friederike Moltmann: On the Distinction between Abstract States, Concrete States, and Tropes
12: Nicholas Asher and Francis Jeffry Pelletier: More Truths About Generic Truth
13: Ariel Cohen: No Quantification Without Reinterpretation
14: Francis Corblin: The Roots of Genericity: Indefinite singulars vs definite plurals
15: Manfred Krifka: Definitional Generics
16: Bernhard Nickel: Dutchman are Good Sailors: Generics and gradability
References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Beyssade, Claire
Claire Beyssade is a CNRS researcher at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. She obtained a PhD in formal semantics in 1994 at the University of Caen. Her work focuses on the semantics of noun phrases, on the study of presuppositions, implicatures and other projected contents, and more recently on the semantics of intonation. She is also interested in modelisation of interpretation in terms of interaction, in formal but not denotational frameworks. She is the author of one book on the semantics of propositional attitudes and of two books, in collaboration with Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, on indefinites.

Del Prete, Fabio
Fabio Del Prete received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Milan in 2006. He is currently a researcher in natural language semantics at the CNRS laboratory CLLE-ERSS in Toulouse, France. His research interests lie in the domains of temporal and modal expressions. He has recently worked on the interaction between temporal connectives and scalar approximative adverbs, on issues of modality underlying future tensed sentences, and on imperfective aspect in connection with habituality.

Mari, Alda
Alda Mari is a CNRS researcher at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. She studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and linguistics and obtained a PhD at the EHESS in formal semantics. Her first appointment as CNRS researcher was at the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Télécommunications in computational linguistics. She has been visiting professor at CUNY for one year. She is the author of two books on comitativity and modality. Her work in lexical and formal semantics focuses on reciprocals, generics, comitative expressions and past modals.

Alda Mari is a CNRS researcher at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. She studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and linguistics and obtained a PhD at the EHESS in formal semantics. Her first appointment as CNRS researcher was at the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Télécommunications in computational linguistics. She has been visiting professor at CUNY for one year. She is the author of two books on comitativity and modality. Her work in lexical and formal semantics focuses on reciprocals, generics, comitative expressions and past modals.

Claire Beyssade is a CNRS researcher at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. She obtained a PhD in formal semantics in 1994 at the University of Caen. Her work focuses on the semantics of noun phrases, on the study of presuppositions, implicatures and other projected contents, and more recently on the semantics of intonation. She is also interested in modelisation of interpretation in terms of interaction, in formal but not denotational frameworks. She is the author of one book on the semantics of propositional attitudes and of two books, in collaboration with Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, on indefinites.

Fabio Del Prete received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Milan in 2006. He is currently a researcher in natural language semantics at the CNRS laboratory CLLE-ERSS in Toulouse, France. His research interests lie in the domains of temporal and modal expressions. He has recently worked on the interaction between temporal connectives and scalar approximative adverbs, on issues of modality underlying future tensed sentences, and on imperfective aspect in connection with habituality.