A PUZZLE ABOUT GENERICS

In the seventies the study of generics received strong impetus from the work of Lawler (1972, 1973a, 1973b). Unfortunately, Lawler could do little more than point out a host of unsolved puzzles in connection with generics and admit that he was not "able to offer any decent analyses or explanations for the phenomena" he had discovered (Lawler 1972: 255). Even the third of the three papers opens with the remark: "Whereas last year I was forced to confess that we knew almost nothing about generics, this year I am pleased to report that we know almost something about them" (Lawler 1973b: 320). Some of the puzzles noted by Lawler appear to have received some sort of explanation (see e.g. Carlson 1977, Declerck 1986), but many still remain. In this paper I propose to tackle a problem that is touched upon but left unsolved in each of Lawler 's papers, and which (to my knowledge) has not received an explanation since. It concerns sentences like the following: