Genericity is Easy? Formal and Experimental Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the formal semantics approach togenericity, within which genericity is viewed as a species of quanti-fication, and a growing body of experimental and developmentalwork on the topic, mainly by psychologists rather than linguists,proposing that genericity is categorically different from (and sig-nificantly simpler than) quantification. We argue that this generics-as-default hypothesis is much less well supported by evidence thanits supporters contend, and that a research program combiningtheoretical and experimental research methods and considera-tions in the same studies is required to make progress.