Linguistics Seminar Talk - Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga

Title: How do languages express generalisations? Investigating generics across languages via a toolkit

Abstract: 

All languages are thought to have ways to express generalisations, like ‘Leopards have spots’, ‘Dodo birds are extinct’ and ‘Canadians like hockey’. While much is known about generics in English and several closely related languages, they are not as well-understood across languages as other linguistic forms. Addressing this limitation, our Generics Across Languages program systematically studies a wide set of languages from different language families, via the means of a newly developed toolkit, combining insights from formal linguistics, cognitive psychology and semantic fieldwork elicitation techniques, focusing on their morphosyntax and semantics. In this talk, I will first discuss the motivation for this project and how it fits within the broader generics literature. I will then present our methodology and the Generics Toolkit we developed, whose primary component is a series of storyboards with embedded target sentences, focusing on different ontological categories and targeting five key readings. The talk will showcase data from our current database, which comprises data from 19 languages, collected via our network of international collaborators. This work will facilitate an in-depth examination of proposed universals on generics, shedding light on their theoretical implications.