Genericity in Greek: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

In this paper we present results from a context-acceptability judgment task that addressed genericity in Greek following a design used by Ionin et al. (2011). The task investigates two sources of genericity: (a) sentence-level genericity with a non-Well-Defined Kind (e.g., “a green lamp”) and (b) NP-level genericity with a WDK (e.g., “a dodo bird”) followed by a kind predicate (e.g., “be extinct”). Our results largely confirm the predictions and support Dayal’s (2004) theoretical account of genericity: definite singulars were rated higher with NP-level than with sentence-level genericity, definite plurals were rated equally high with both types of genericity, and modified indefinite singulars were rated higher with sentence-level than with NP-level genericity. With respect to the WDK restriction on definite singulars, even though the difference between the two conditions was significant, definite singulars with sentence-level genericity were rated higher than expected. This casts doubts on the universality WDK restriction, which would have to be addressed in future work.