Focus Effect on Genericity

Abstract

It has been accepted since Diesing (1992) that focus placements in a sentence can have influence on whether its bare noun phrase subject is interpreted as existential or generic. But there has been little attention on a semantic difference between focused and unfocused generics, and only unfocused generics have usually been treated in the literature. I argue that focused generics should be distinguished from unfocused generics semantically. The purpose of this paper is to reveal linguistic phenomena in which both focus and genericity appear, and to account for then from a semantic point of view.