On the Semantic Composition of English Generic Sentences

One part of the task in presenting a semantics for a natural language is to show how the meanings of the constituents of a sentence are combined with one another to build up a meaning for the whole sentence. To a certain degree, this part of the task can be worked on without committing oneself too specifically to any particular theory of meaning, and that is what I am going to try to do here. The construction of interest is that of generic sentences. Such sentences are found in all natural languages (though not in all artificial languages), but I will confine my remarks to how English generic sentences are built up from constituent meanings, ever hopeful that what I have to say about English will shed light on similar constructions in a wider range of natural languages. I will begin by giving a series of descriptions of what generic sentences are, working from the most notional and towards the most linguistic, to first stake out the domain of inquiry. I then turn to the semantic composition of such sentences, arguing that they are not uniformly of subject-predicate form, but that a wider variety of internal relations must be recognized. The overall purpose of the following discussion is to provide a set of general considerations that any formal semantic theory incorporating generics must contend with.1

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