Morphosyntactic and Referential Cues to the Identification of Generic Statements

Generic sentences (e.g., “birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about kinds, rather than facts about specific individuals or groups of individuals (e.g., “all birds lay eggs”). Generics are an important method of transmitting cultural knowledge, but because there is no unique marker of genericity, identifying whether a sentence is generic is a challenge. Here we investigated how morphosyntactic and pragmatic cues guide language users in determining whether naturalistic sentences should receive generic interpretations. Experiment 1 demonstrates the effect of the morphosyntactic features of a sentence’s subject noun phrase (NP) on generic interpretation. Experiments 2 and 3 reveal that when a sentence’s subject NP does not have an obvious referent in context, the sentence is more likely to receive a generic interpretation. These data suggest the beginnings of an account by which cues to genericity could be combined to make graded, contextual judgments about whether an utterance has an intended generic meaning.