The generic article

Abstract

We take a fresh look at the connection between genericity and (in)definiteness by reconsidering a long-standing puzzle concerning the relation between definiteness and genericity. We contrast English on the one hand and Romance languages and Hungarian on the other, focusing on generic sentences involving plurals. The two language groups differ in that English uses indefinite bare plurals in generic generalizations (‘Dogs are intelligent’) and in kind-level NPs (‘Dinosaurs are extinct’) while the other group uses definite plurals in both these cases (‘Les chiens sont intelligents’, ‘Les dinosaurs sont éteints’). We argue that this difference is due to the existence of a competition between definite and indefinite forms in generic environments. The contrast results from the fact that the relevant parameters are weighed differently in different languages. The analysis is formulated in terms of O(ptimality) T(heory). It predicts both the overlap and the disparity in article choice for the languages under consideration.