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The Generic Book

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena.

474 pages | 2 line drawings, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 1995

Cognitive Science: Language

Language and Linguistics: Formal Logic and Computational Linguistics, Syntax and Semantics

Philosophy: Logic and Philosophy of Language

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
1: Genericity: An Introduction
Manfred Krifka, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Gregory N. Carlson, Alice ter
Meulen, Gennaro Chierchia, Godehard Link.
2: Stage-Level and Individual-Level Predicates
Angelika Kratzer
3: Individual-Level Predicates as Inherent Generics
Gennaro Chierchia
4: Truth Conditions of Generic Sentences: Two Contrasting Views
Gregory N. Carlson
5: Focus and the Interpretation of Generic Sentences
Manfred Krifka
6: Indefinites, Adverbs of Quantification, and Focus Semantics
Mats Rooth
7: What Some Generic Sentences Mean
Nicholas Asher, Michael Morreau.
8: Semantic Constraints on Type-Shifting Anaphora
Alice ter Meulen
9: Generic Information and Dependent Generics
Godehard Link
10: The Semantics of the Common Noun Kind
Karina Wilkinson
11: Common Nouns: A Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English
Manfred Krifka
12: The Marking of the Episodic/Generic Distinction in Tense-Aspect Systems
Osten Dahl
Bibliography of Recent Work on Genericity
Name Index
Language Index
Subject Index

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