A new development in the study of generic sentences

総称文研究の新展開 （宮崎充保教授退職記念号）

A new development in the study of generic sentences

Creators Iwabe Kozo

Sara-Jane Leslie, who is a professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, is presenting a new framework for the study of generic sentences.　Generic sentences like "tigers are striped", "ducks lay eggs", and "sharks attack bathers" are all acceptable as generalizations.　But, as is well known, it is difficult to give a semantic account for these sentences, since their apparent truth conditions are very different from each other:　All normal tigers are striped, less than half of the ducks lay eggs, and very few sharks attack bathers.　Leslie shows that generic sentences are based on the default generalization, which is non-quantificational in nature, and that children acquire them earlier than the explicit quantifiers like all or some.　I certainly agree with Leslie's claim that children easily develop the ability of non-quantificational default generalization.　But generic sentences are actually not uniform.　Specifically, the subjects of generic sentences have three different forms in English: the indefinite singular, the definite singular, and the bare plural.　I assume that the variety of generic sentences reflects the dual aspect of the human cognitive capacity, and propose that while some of the generic sentences are non-quantificational, the others are definitely quantificational.　Although there has been a long controversy between quantificational and non-quantificational approaches to generic sentences, I believe that they will naturally reconcile in the framework of Leslie's.　In this paper, I will assort issues to solve and try to sketch the way to the goal.

[ISSN]0288-2396

[NCID]AN00021380