基本説明
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.
Full Description
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics and pursues the enterprise of the influential Generic Book edited by Gregory Carlson and Jeffry Pelletier, which was published in 1995. Genericity is a key notion in the study of human cognition as it reveals our capacity to organize our perceived reality into classes and to describe regularities. The generic can be expressed at the level of a word or phrase (ie the potato in The Irish economy became dependent upon the potato) or an entire sentence (eg in John smokes a cigar after dinner, the generic aspect is a property of the expression, rather than any single word or phrase within it). This book gathers new work from senior and young researchers to reconsider the notion of genericity, examining the distinct contributions made by the determiner phrase (eg the notions of kind/individual) and the verbal predicate (eg the notions of permanency, disposition, ability, habituality, and plurality). Finally, in connection with the whole sentence, the analytic/synthetic distinction is discussed as well as the notion of normality. The book will appeal to both students and scholars in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science
Contents
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
