Abstract

Krifka and others have recently developed modal accounts of the GEN operator that allows multiple readings of a generic sentence to be represented. These modal accounts do not satisfactorily deal with the observation that the truth of a generic sentence may be relative to a particular context. This problem is addressed using a model of generics based on Barwise and Seligman's Channel Theory, a recently-developed mathematical model of information-flow that accounts for context and exceptions. The Channel Theoretic model possesses several important properties, which allow an analysis of some traditionally problematic issues in the semantics of generics. 1 Introduction We begin with a brief discussion of the existence of multiple readings for some generic sentences, showing how Krifka (1995) represents the semantics of such sentences, using the quantificational account of generics developed by Wilkinson (1986, 1991), Kratzer (1995) and Diesing (1988) and a modal account of the semanti...

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