galabra / semantics-nlp-research

Measuring grammatical manifestations of a semantic phenomenon

Measuring Generic Structures in an English Novel

A seminar paper from September 2019

As generic sentences appear to derive from non-generic (i.e. episodic) sentences (Carlson and Pelletier 1995), the grammatical structures that are used to express genericity are not exclusive to generics (Dahl 1995).

These structures that allow manifestation of generic NPs are generally restricted to bare plural nouns, definite singular nouns or indefinite singular nouns, with bare plurals being the most common structure in modern English (Cohen 2002).

While the above claim seems well-accepted, the complementing question - regarding the commonality of these grammatical structures’ generic interpretation - remained unattended.

Using George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as a corpus, I have tried to address both the probability of a bare plural being interpreted generically and the semantic and grammatical conditions that encourage these generic readings.