Genericity and Topicality: Towards Dynamic Genericity
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This paper argues that typical generic sentences are topic constructions crosslinguistically, supporting Lee's 1996 initial claim, but argues against Cohen et al's 2002 claim that focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus can apply to either generic or anti-generic/existential phrases. Therefore, contrastively focused bare plurals can be generic, not necessarily existential. PL-marking and NumCl-marking in Korean and Japanese are anti-generic (existential) and distributive in nature, interacting with information structure. Generic sentences are about generic DPs, which function as Topics as semantic definites such as a bare singular common noun with a Topic marker in Korean (a 'definitional' generic, Krifka 2009), bare plurals (or indefinite singular) in English, and definites in French, typically combined with individual-level predicates of characterizing or kind-referring nature, as in (1) Say-nun nal-n-ta 'Birds fly.' An existential sentence in Korean, on the other hand, has a NOM marker in the subject DP and is PL(ural)-marked, followed by a stage-level predicate, as in (2) Say-ka/-tul-i nal-a ka-ko iss-ta 'Birds are flying,' as opposed to the atemporal PRES predicate in (1). Focus-sensitive cases such as Even mammals lay eggs and cec-mek-i-tongmul-to al-ul nah-a (???cec-mek- i-tongmul-un al-ul nah-a) will be discussed and dynamic genericity is proposed to meet from context to context changes and existential-like generic situations
Abstract
This paper argues that typical generic sentences are topic constructions crosslinguistically, supporting Lee's 1996 initial claim, but argues against Cohen et al's 2002 claim that focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus can apply to either generic or anti-generic/existential phrases. Therefore, contrastively focused bare plurals can be generic, not necessarily existential. PL-marking and NumCl-marking in Korean and Japanese are anti-generic (existential) and distributive in nature, interacting with information structure. Generic sentences are about generic DPs, which function as Topics as semantic definites such as a bare singular common noun with a Topic marker in Korean (a 'definitional' generic, Krifka 2009), bare plurals (or indefinite singular) in English, and definites in French, typically combined with individual-level predicates of characterizing or kind-referring nature, as in (1) Say-nun nal-n-ta 'Birds fly.' An existential sentence in Korean, on the other hand, has a NOM marker in the subject DP and is PL(ural)-marked, followed by a stage-level predicate, as in (2) Say-ka/-tul-i nal-a ka-ko iss-ta 'Birds are flying,' as opposed to the atemporal PRES predicate in (1). Focus-sensitive cases such as Even mammals lay eggs and cec-mek-i-tongmul-to al-ul nah-a (???cec-mek- i-tongmul-un al-ul nah-a) will be discussed and dynamic genericity is proposed to meet from context to context changes and existential-like generic situations
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