What’s positive and negative about generics: a constrained indexical approach

Abstract

Generics, which are often expressed using bare plurals (e.g., "Tigers are striped"), have received much attention from both philosophers and linguists. 1 But generics have proved resistant to systematic semantic theorizing. This is mainly because generics can be used to express propositions with radically different quantificational forces: that of universal quantifiers (e.g., "all"), modalized universal quantifiers (e.g., "all … can," "ideally, all," "under normal circumstances, all"), proportional quantifiers (e.g., "most," "many"), and quasi-existential quantifiers (e.g., "a few"). Nguyen (2020) calls this data The Variety Data, but we prefer to call it The Positive Data: 2The Positive Data (The Variety Data) 3,4 (1) [A few] mosquitoes transmit malaria. 51 For broad introductions to the literature on generics, see Krifka et al. (1995), Leslie (2016), and Sterken (2017). 2 In the absence of an explicitly supplied context, we will assume typical contexts. Bach (2002) and Bach (2005) have argued that in the absence of an explicitly provided context, speakers evaluate sentences by imagining a typical one. Some evidence that speakers can automatically supply a typical context is the felicity of some sentences containing context-dependent expressions despite the absence of any explicitly offered context. For example, "She left Bob" can be understood as meaning "Bob's female ex-partner left Bob" despite the lack of any explicitly offered context to help resolve the reference of "she." 3 Only the unbracketed material is overtly pronounced. The bracketed material indicates the quantificational force of what is asserted. 4 Here are sample lexical entries for the quantifiers in the positive data: ⟦"all"⟧ c = λF. λG.