ABSTRACT
Generics are statements such as “doctors heal people,” “a tiger is striped,” “the dodo is extinct,” “a duck lays eggs,”,“kettles boil water,” and “mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus.” Generic statements express general claims about kinds and categories, rather than claims about particular individuals. In English, generics can be expressed using a variety of syntactic forms: bare plurals (e.g. “ducks lay eggs”), indefinite singulars (e.g. “a tiger is striped”), and definite singulars (“the dog is a mammal”).
