Is Exception-tolerance of Generic Sentences a Universal Property of Natural Languages?
A central property of generic sentences is the well-known tolerance to exceptions,which brings a big challenge to the linguistic research of generics.In recent years,generics have remained a popular topic in semantics.However,no consensus has been reached.This paper presents an overview of the issue of exception-tolerance of generic sentences as well as some influential analyses that have been advanced in the current literature,including quantificational approach,cognitive approach,kind-predication approach,and pragmatic approach.The paper also makes some reflection on tolerance to exceptions.Following Liebesman(2011),we assume that exception-tolerance is not peculiar to generic sentences,but a universal property of natural languages.The underlying mechanism of exception-tolerance of generic sentences is the property inheritance of the whole from its parts which is very common in ordinary predications such as The towel is wet.Generic sentences are direct predications of a certain property possessed by the abstract individual"kinds".Kinds have their own members which are spatiotemporally bounded concrete objects.A kind and its members constitute part-whole relations.In the sense of parts and wholes,the semantics of generic sentences is not as complicated as most of the previous studies have considered.The so-called exception-tolerance is actually a universal property of natural languages.Generic sentences are simple kind-predications,on par with ordinary atomic sentences.This paper provides a new perspective and implications for the controversies in semantic theories of generics.
generic sentencestolerance to exceptionskindgeneric operator
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