Lecture: Existential Generics and Information Structure

Generic sentences are used to convey exception-tolerant generalizations over a kind or, roughly, relevant members thereof (Carlson & Pelletier 1995; Cohen 2016). In English they often take the form of a bare plural (BP). The conditions under which generic sentences are acceptable is controversial, but common to many theories is an assumption that they involve some lawlike, universal/majority quantification (Dahl 1973; Pelletier & Asher 1997). However, it was acknowledged that generics receive an existential interpretation in certain environments (von Fintel 1997, Cohen 2004, Sterken, 2015): (i) When embedded as a propositional prejacent of a focus-sensitive particles (ii) existential generics usually judged to be unacceptable when presented out of the blue are considerably more felicitous when served as answers to a current Question Under Discussion (QUD) (Roberts 2012).
Such data pose challenges to most existing accounts. I argue that by incorporating certain principles of Information Structure (Rooth 1992; Büring 2016; Vallduví 2016); and discourse pragmatics (Roberts 2012; Lewis 1979; Beaver and Clark 2008) the semantics of BP generics can be reduced to a simple existential component. However, this requires that we abandon the Quasi-Universal Hypothesis. In this proposal, BP generics have a default weak existential semantics. In most instances where a generic is judged to be degraded, they are strictly true. I replace semantic constraints with felicity conditions that make reference to information structure in discourse. Following Cohen & Erteschik-Shir 2002, I propose that within a BP generic (i) the ‘informationally marked’ element answers to the immediate QUD. In the case of the predicate, it will be focused; in the case of the subject, it will be marked as a contrastive topic; (ii) the ‘informationally unmarked’ element should not answer the immediate QUD; (iii) Focus marking can be rendered more obvious through phonetic prominence, focus-sensitive particles, or contextual set-up; and (iv) The apparent quasi-universal, law-like reading of generics is a result of the interaction between BP generics’ lexical presuppositions and pragmatic reasoning, and the interpretational variability of generics is partly explained by the open-ended nature of pragmatic implications in general.

Info

Day: 2022-05-28
Start time: 14:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: Living Lab (1.34)
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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