How can genericity be expressed? A four-language experimental study using Thurstone Scaling
Imke Driemel, Johannes Hein, Desiré Carioti, Jakob Wünsch, Vina Paraskevi Tsakali, Artemis Alexiadou, Uli Sauerland, Maria Teresa Guasti
January 2025 

Generic and kind readings can be realized by a multitude of structures within and across languages. Romance languages like Italian for example make use of definite plurals but English employs bare plurals, while both options seem to be available in German. Across languages, further additional but restricted generic readings, such as the taxonomic reading and the rule-based reading, can be expressed by the use of the definite singular and the indefinite singular, respectively. As there is little cross-linguistic empirical work on this topic, we conducted an experimental study on English, German, Italian, and Greek investigating the restrictions on the distribution of the different noun types. In doing so, we used the Thurstone method for comparative judgements, a design that is rarely used in experimental linguistics. Specifically, our results report on the universality of the Blocking Principle, the cross-linguistic robustness of the well-defined kind restriction on the definite singular, and an underlying rule-based account of genericity for the indefinite singular.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/008738 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	generic, kind, well defined kind restriction, bare plural, definite plural, indefinite plural, definite singular, english, german, greek, italian, semantics, syntax
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