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Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, May 27, 2011
3:30 PM
CSB 703
Gregory Carlson
Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Rochester
Generics and Habituals

Greg Carlson will talk informally about the semantics of generics and habituals, including issues covered in two recent articles:

Generics and habituals

Generic sentences such as “Birds fly” have two aspects that have been studied somewhat independently in the semantics literature. One is the truth conditions of the sentences that express such generalizations, and another is the meaning or denotation of the generic nominals (in this instance, the Noun Phrase “Birds”). The present article focuses mainly on the denotations of the nominals, beginning with the view that such expressions name kinds of things. Various other points of view are discussed and compared, including whether the nominals are definite descriptions or indefinites.

Habitual aspect

A good many languages have a means of formally distinguishing generalizations from point-time reports of events. For example, English has the “used to” grammatical construction that can disambiguate a single form (“John ate lots of apples” meaning, yesterday, or that was John's habit over some past stretch of time, vs. “John used to eat lots of apples”, which is the generalization only). Any grammatical form that accomplishes this is often referred to as “habitual aspect,” largely since it seems to be expressed somewhere within the verbal complex (roughly, the verb and its auxiliaries). While it is not clear that such forms are properly to be thought of as an “aspect”, many languages with such markers also express generalizations without any specific marking as well. The article investigates the kinds of patterns that appear and current research on their semantic import.