Learning about the world through generic statements: a cross-linguistic perspective
Collaborative project with Napoleon Katsos (University of Cambridge) and Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary University of London).
Partially funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2014-15)
Generic statements such as ‘tigers have stripes’ attribute properties to kinds, but unlike universally quantified statements (‘Every tiger has stripes’), they are tolerant of (albino tigers). Little is known about how children learn the meaning of genericity or adults process it, despite the obvious importance of understanding how we think and about properties and kinds. An influential proposal suggests that genericity is the default innate mode of thinking and that universal quantifiers are initially misinterpreted as generic. However, this approach is not fully informed by cross-linguistic observations or theories of quantification.
To establish a critical evidence-base, we investigated how adult native speakers of two languages with distinct ways of expressing generic statements, English and Greek, process these statements and how young native speakers of English learn their meaning.