Dutchmen are Good Sailors: Generics and Gradability∗

Abstract

Many generics have quite strong interpretations. Ravens are black is naturally paraphrased as all normal ravens are black. However, there is a sundry collection of weak generics, ones that can be true even though most members of the kind at issue do not conform to them, including Dutchmen are good sailors and lions have manes. This chapter presents a new semantic theory for generics on which the weakness of the first of these and others like it is due to the interaction between a generic operator and the semantics of gradable predicates, and argues that the account is empirically and theoretically preferable to extant proposals. Methodologically, the chapter argues that we should not expect a uniform account of all weak generics.

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