Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The puzzle of genericity and language acquisition

Maria Teresa Guasti

Children seem to express generic statements quite early (around age 3, Gelman 1988; task, Prasada 2000) and in home sign language expression of genericity is a resilient property of language (Goldin Medow, 2005). Yet the expression of kind and genericity vary across languages and within languages and this make the task of the child who has to acquire the expression of genericity not easy. In fact, languages differ in the way they express kind and generic readings, with Romance languages like Italian using definite plurals but Germanic languages like English using bare plurals (Krifka et al., 1995; Chierchia, 1998; Dayal, 2004; Ionin et al., 2011). Greek patterns with Romance (Alexiadou et al., 2007; Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Alexiadou, 2019), but German has been claimed to allow both bare and definite plurals (Krifka et al., 1995; Longobardi, 1994; Dayal, 2004; Schaden, 2012; Barton et al., 2015). In addition, it has been argued that in American-English generics can be expressed by definite plurals, when the speaker wants to signal distance themselves and the kind expressed (Acton (2019) [The Americans love cars à said by a non-American]. Finally, in normative contexts, the singular indefinite has been claimed to be an option (Cohen 2001) [A gentleman opens doors for ladies]. In face of these variations, and as a preliminary to understand the task for the acquirer, I report of a quantitative study that aim to clarify what are the preferences in four languages (Italian, Greek, English and German) to express genericity. To achieve this goal, we collected dat in the four languages from about 150 adult participants using Thrstone’s method of multiple comparisons is used. This method allows one to establish which is the best option(s) and how distant are the options, i.e., it allows to measure the grandience between option. This presentation is based on ongoing collaborative work from Driemel, Hein, Carioti, Wünsch, Tsakali, Alexiadou, Sauerland, Maria Teresa Guasti.