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Generics and cognition : Exception management, argumentation and normative dimension| title | Generics and cognition : Exception management, argumentation and normative dimension |
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| start_date | 2025/05/20 |
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| schedule | 10h30-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 510 & en ligne |
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| summary | A well-established fact about generic statements is that many license exceptions (Carlson 1977, Krifka et al. 1995). In these “characterizing sentences”, which will be the focus of this talk, the proportion of exceptions varies: Birds fly is true of most birds, whereas Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus is true of about 1%. I will focus on sentences which, like these, have bare plural generic NPs in English.
While such imperfect generalizations pose no problems to speakers, finding a theoretical explanation has proved extremely difficult (Krifka et al. 1995, Leslie 2007). The first approaches looked for truth-conditional semantics, identifying a value for a GEN operator (such as “all in the most normal of worlds for that individual”, Asher & Pelletier 1992), based on quantification or, for Cohen (2004), on a complex probabilistic model. These, however, leave problems to be solved, and psychologists have shown that very young children use generics, years before they acquire quantifiers. This disqualifies any quantifier-based approach, at least for a theory that seeks to understand how generics work in the brain. Instead, in a cognitive/psychological approach, generics are seen as the result of “the most primitive, default generalizations” (Leslie 2007, 2008; Brandone et al. 2012).
I would like to show how a cognitive approach improves on truth-conditional semantics. Combined with an attention to naturally-occurring data, it shows that exception licensing:
1) depends on the type of property (Leslie 2007, 2008)
2) depends on speakers: they have imperfect knowledge, beliefs (Gardelle 2023)
3) depends on context: licensing may be sensitive to argumentative effects (ibid.)
4) is not restricted to generics: homogenization exists for all plurals (ibid.)
Understanding 1)-4) also helps us understand stereotyping and normative generics, such as Boys don’t cry.
The talk can also have us think of how we do theory, in particular how we incorporate fuzziness. |
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| responsibles | François |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/02/05 10:18 UTC |
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