Genericity

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.

1. Introduction ; 2. Generic Plural and Mass Indefinites ; 3. The Scope of Bare Nominals ; 4. Free Relatives as Kind Denoting Terms ; 5. Two Ways of 'Referring to Generalities' in German ; 6. Hab and Gen in the Expression of Habituality ; 7. Bare Habituals and Singular Indefinites ; 8. Imperfectivity and Habituality in Italian ; 9. Ability, Action, and Causation: From pure abilty to force ; 10. On Dispositional Sentences ; 11. On the Distinction between Abstract States, Concrete States, and Tropes ; 12. More Truths About Generic Truth ; 13. No Quantification Without Reinterpretation ; 14. The Roots of Genericity: Indefinite singulars vs definite plurals ; 15. Definitional Generics ; 16. Dutchman are Good Sailors: Generics and gradability ; References ; Index