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{ "pk": 26207, "title": "Inferring Generic Meaning From Pragmatic Reference Failure", "subtitle": null, "abstract": "Generic sentences (e.g., “birds lay eggs”) express generaliza-tions about kinds, in contrast to non-generic sentences thatexpress facts about specific individuals or sets of individuals(e.g., “all birds lay eggs”). Although generics are pervasive innatural language, there is no unique linguistic marker of gener-icity, making the identification of generics a challenge. We in-vestigate the morphosyntactic cues that listeners use to identifywhether a sentence should receive a generic interpretation ornot. We find that two factors – the definiteness of a sentence’ssubject NP and the tense of the sentence – are extremely im-portant in guiding intuitions about whether a sentence shouldreceive a generic interpretation. We argue that the importanceof these factors can be explained by taking generic interpreta-tions to arise due to a failure to ground expressions as referringto specific entities or events.", "language": "eng", "license": { "name": "", "short_name": "", "text": null, "url": "" }, "keywords": [ { "word": "Psycholinguistics; pragmatics; generics" } ], "section": "Papers", "is_remote": true, "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s3632sz", "frozenauthors": [ { "first_name": "Phil", "middle_name": "", "last_name": "Crone", "name_suffix": "", "institution": "Stanford University", "department": "" }, { "first_name": "Michael", "middle_name": "C.", "last_name": "Frank", "name_suffix": "", "institution": "Stanford University", "department": "" } ], "date_submitted": null, "date_accepted": null, "date_published": "2016-01-01T18:00:00Z", "render_galley": null, "galleys": [ { "label": "PDF", "type": "pdf", "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26207/galley/15843/download/" } ] }