{"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/"}]}