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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 that is based on the choice of normal objects does better justice to the data in question than an analysis that relies on a choice of normal worlds alone.A further conceptual advantage of an explicit separation of (a) a choice of best exemplars and (b) a modal component of generic quantification consists in the fact that it highlights that different generic sentences can rely on different kinds of choice of best exemplar.Comparing their logical behaviour, I will demonstrate that we should at least distinguish between normal-generic sentences and ideal-generic sentences. Finally, the paper proves that the account I propose is a modal variant of some recent purely extensional default logics, developed in AL

In this paper, I want to establish semantic reanalysis as an independent mode of meaning change in language history. My point of departure will be cases of language change that have traditionally been classed as "grammaticalization", on one hand because we will find very nice instances of semantic reanalysis particuarly in that field, and on the other hand because I think that the notion of semantic reanalysis that I propose can be particularly helpful in elucidating some hitherto poorly understood semantic changes in grammaticalization. In order to achive this double purpose, to characterise semantic reanalysis and to demonstrate its power as a tool of diachronic analysis, the paper is organized in the following way: I will first briefly present some cases of grammaticalization, focussing mainly on the meaning changes they involve. I will next give an overview over previous proposals as to what kind of semantic processes underlie these changes, arguing that neither of them is fully convincing. I will then demonstrate how the meaning side of the changes in question can be analysed as semantic reanalysis in semantic composition. Finally, I will evaluate the emerging picture with respect to the common observation that the meanings of words in grammaticalization just "fade away" or "bleach".

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In this paper, I will propose a uniform analysis for adjectival and certain instances of adverbial eigentlich. The analysis rests on the assumption that eigentlich contrasts the nominal content of a concept C with a contextually given notion of phenomenological evidence for C-hood. eigentlich offers the semantic frame to refer to two ways of C-hood which are usually supplied by context. In the adjectival use, the discourse content should provide an N exemplar in the true sense (an eigentliches N) along with an apparent N, thereby proving the two notions to be different. In the adverbial use, the message conveyed is usually that the actual world nominally satisfies some proposition p (eigentlich, p) while the actual world looks as if a contrasting proposition q were the case. The analysis improves on earlier accounts in German descriptive linguistics in that it offers a fully compositional account of the semantic and pragmatic contribution of eigentlich in a wide variety of constructions, including focus, contrastive topic and questions. The analysis proposes a delineation of eigentlich as an emotive marker which differs from the content use in prosody, syntax, focus sensitivity and meaning.