Introduction

Genericity has recently become a central topic of debate in both linguistics and cognitive science. The set of questions addressed in the two disciplines stems from the foundational work in The Generic Book (Carlson and Pelletier, 1995), most notably from the idea that generic sentences involve a generic quantifier GEN. This hypothesis, which has led the research on generics across languages for thirty years, is now being reconsidered, and linguists have attempted to locate the root of generi..