As is well known, research on generics is represented by three approaches: majority- based (Cohen 1996, 1999, 2004), normalcy-based (Nickel 2006; 2009; 2010a, b; 2013; 2016; 2018), and cognition-based (Leslie 2007a, b; 2008; 2013; 2017) approaches. Two recent approaches proposed by van Rooij and Schulz (2020) and Tessler and Goodman (2019) are more elaborated theories on generics, although neither of these approaches nor the three representative theories can fully account for various generics data, as argued by Yoon (2021). On (...) the other hand, Nguyen (2020) proposes another theory of generics, the so-called ‘radical’ theory, which argues that the generic operator has no semantic content, and that the various quantificational interpretations of bare plural generics are determined contextually. In this context, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of some recently published analyses, including Nguyen’s theory, and to analyze non-conventionalized generics. While conventionalized or conceptualized generics have received much attention from researchers, non- conventionalized generics have not been studied as extensively. It will be argued that Nguyen’s theory simply transfers the burden onto pragmatics, and that non- conventionalized as well as conventionalized generics tend to be interpreted based on people’s perceptions of their exceptions, in line with Yoon (2021). This position will be supported by experimental results. (shrink)

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse (...) Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, the semantic analysis defines a general schema for quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008, 2010, nor error states, contra Champollion 2016, nor singular donkey pronouns with plural referents, contra Krifka 1996, Yoon 1996. We also show that the pragmatic account improves over alternatives like Kanazawa 1994 that attribute the readings of donkey sentences to the monotonicity properties of the embedding quantifier. (shrink)