On Tense, Aspect and Genericity in English and Romanian: Insights from Language Acquisition
Alexandra Cornilescu, Alexandru Nicolae
June 2025 

This paper offers a contrastive analysis of English and Romanian generic sentences, arguing that generics originate from a simple conceptual structure. We argue that the comprehension and production of generics require no functional structure, but rather merely the comprehension of lexical aspect in its simplest form, namely states. While English distinguishes generics from episodics via the progressive, Romanian’s imperfective lacks this distinction. Additionally, cross-linguistic variation is evident in the semantics of definite articles. English definite articles encode familiarity and maximality, aligning with constraints on kind reference, while Romanian articles, marked with phi-features, encode maximality and treat familiarity as an optional pragmatic feature. The paper also argues that there are good grounds to give up the covert Gen(eric) operator. [v3 - June 2025: minor editorial changes (misplaced quotation marks in the previous drafts, typos, etc.)]

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009039 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	generic, episodic, aspect, progressive, imperfective, kinds, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [June 2025] v1 [May 2025]
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