Essays on genericity

This thesis collects five papers that are connected by the common theme of genericity in natural language, and gives an account of the meaning of generic sentences. I begin in Chapter 2 by exploring extant versions of the standard modal theory, providing novel considerations in favour of two particular implementations which I build upon in later chapters. In Chapter 3, I turn to the logical form of generic sentences, which I take to involve covert quantification. I develop a new argument that generics have covert quantificational structure by examining the ramifications of the invalidity of an under-explored logical principle. This argument has deleterious effects for kind-predication theories that eschew quantification. Chapter 4 considers whether recent research on the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for the modal theory. I argue that all the acquisition data that rivals theories can accommodate can also be explained by appealing to Universal Grammar, but not vice versa, a fact that counts in favour of the modal theory. Chapter 5 develops a new semantics for generics which I call the structured theory. The structured theory is comprised of a standard modal semantics (like those given in Chapter 2) together with an algebraic account of plurality in the framework of situation semantics. I argue that the structured theory makes sense of generic conjunctions, like 'Elephants live in Africa and Asia', providing an adequate account of their meaning, and thus undermines the support for alternative semantics. Chapter 6 investigates novel data concerning sequences of generics, and develops a compositional account of how the dynamics of conversation affects the interpretation of generics, which I call the dynamic theory. The key is to take the meaning of generics to be constrained by the possibilities raised by previously entertained generics. This theory illustrates the need for a dynamic semantics for generics, one that the modal theory comfortably provides.