Formulas and Properties, Their Links and Characteristics

In this work, we study links between first-order formulas and arbitrary properties for families of theories, classes of structures and their isomorphism types. Possibilities for ranks and degrees for formulas and theories with respect to the given properties are described. Characteristics of generic sentences and generic theories with respect to these properties are described and characterized.

A Causal Semantics of IS Generics

The felicity, or acceptability, of IS generics, i.e. generic sentences with indefinite singulars, is considerably more restricted compared to BP generics, generics with bare plurals. The goal of this paper is to account for the limited felicity of IS generics compared to BP generics, on the one hand, while preserving the close similarity between the two types of generics, on the other. We do so by proposing a causal analysis of IS generics, and show that this corresponds closely with a probabilistic analysis of BP generics.

Incremental Understanding of Conjunctive Generic Sentences

Generic statements convey generalizations about categories, but how generic predications combine is unclear. “Elephants live in Africa and Asia” does not mean that individual elephants live on both continents. In addition, such conjunctive generics pose interesting questions for theories of incremental processing because the meaning of the sentence can change part-way through: “Elephants live in Africa” would imply most or all do, but “Africa and Asia” implies some live in each. We extend a recently proposed computational model of generic language understanding with an incremental processing mechanism that can begin to interpret an utterance before a speaker has finished their sentence. This model makes novel predictions about partial interpretations of conjunctive generic sentences, which we test in two behavioral experiments. The results support a strong view of incrementality, wherein listeners continuously update their beliefs based on expectations about where a speaker will go next with their utterance.

Expressing Expectations

This chapter addresses a variety of topics: (i) conditionals (there is a third kind of conditionals, somewhere between indicatives and counterfactuals); (ii) relative gradable adjectives (how do they get their evaluative force?); and (iii) generic sentences (why aren’t they all equally general?). What these topics have in common is that one cannot explain the meaning—not even the logical properties—of the expressions concerned without explaining how they affect people’s expectations. This can best be done in a framework in which the meaning of a sentence is not equated with its truth conditions but with its (potential) impact on the intentional state of an addressee.

Beobachtungen zum Artikelgebrauch durch Lerner des Deutschen (L1: Französisch und Italienisch)

This explorative study sheds light on article usage in German academic texts by French and Italian university (including Ph. D.) students. Given the differences between and among Romance and Germanic language systems, one might expect deviations in article usage in L2 German; in particular, speakers of Romance languages would seem likely to overgeneralise articles in their German language production. Contrary to these hypotheses, the corpora of learner varieties investigated in the present paper do not show evidence of overrepresentation and overgeneralisation of German articles, not even in generic sentences. In fact, articles tend to be underrepresented, as L2 learners often omit articles that are required in L1 German. Potential explanations of these findings are provided, giving rise to further research questions and desiderata. The latter include empirical studies on L1 German article usage in bilingual areas such as South Tirol, the use of articles in translations, and comparisons of article usage between L1 German and the L2 varieties of learners whose L1 does not have grammaticalised articles. Such studies should apply qualitative (i. e. semantic and pragmatic) as well as quantitative methods.

Generics and typicality

Cimpian et al. (2010) observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gsare f ’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn ageneric statement about it, we still interpret it in a much stronger way: (almost) all Gs are f .This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’ and ‘contingency’ from (associativelearning) psychology to provide a semantics of generics that explains why people accept genericsbased on weak evidence. We make use of the Heuristics and Biases approach of Tverskyand Kahneman (1974) and the Associative Theory of Probability Judgements to explain pragmaticallywhy people interpret generic statements in a much stronger way. The spirit of theapproach has much in common with Leslie’s (2008) cognition-based ideas about generics, butthe semantics is grounded on Cohen’s (1999) relative readings of generic sentences. The basicintuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f ’ is true, not because most Gs are (or tend tohave) f , but because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G.Keywords: generics, association, probabilities, pragmatics.