Generic Interpretation Research Articles

Clinical reasoning and generics

ABSTRACT I argue that generic generalizations expressed in language (i.e. ‘generics’) are apt for clinical reasoning. I introduce generics and describe two problems in the use and interpretation of generics: Generics may license inaccurate judgements about the frequency of events or properties within a group (i.e. a problem with the ‘truth-aptness’ of generics) and may facilitate problematic beliefs about social kinds (e.g. prejudice or essentializing). I provide an account of clinical reasoning and describe some features of what I call ‘good’ clinical reasoning. I offer examples of generics in clinical contexts and examine how the two problems with generics (i.e. of truth-aptness and social generics) can harm patients and impair clinical reasoning. However, I ultimately argue that generics are important for good clinical reasoning because they track ‘conspicuous’ features of disease processes (e.g. severe possible outcomes). Further, I argue that prejudicial generics are often irrational to believe. Social generics that are rational to believe need not lead to problematic implicatures about social kinds and can instead facilitate meaningfully articulating societal injustices. I then argue that statistical statements, which are tempting alternatives to generics in clinical reasoning, are no better than generics for good clinical reasoning.

Of the Perfect and the Ordinary: Indistinguishability and Hallucination

Abstract The claim that perfect hallucination is introspectively indistinguishable from perception has been a centrepiece of philosophical theorizing about sense experience. The most common interpretation of the indistinguishability claim is modal: that it is impossible to distinguish perfect hallucination from perception through introspection alone. I run through various models of introspection and show that none of them can accommodate the modal interpretation. Rejecting the modal interpretation opens up two alternative interpretations of the indistinguishability claim. According to the generic interpretation, hallucination is indistinguishable from perception despite the existence of possible exceptions, while according to the actuality interpretation, the indistinguishability of hallucination from perception consists in the actual failure to distinguish hallucination from perception. These alternative understandings of the indistinguishability claim have a number of significant implications for the problem of perception, including the rejection of perfect hallucination and illusion in favour of our ordinary, non-philosophical concepts of these states.

Becoming a Multilatina: strategic capabilities as necessary conditions for the internationalization of Latin American firms

PurposeThis study aims to challenge the generic interpretation of Multilatinas as Latin American firms that have been able to internationalize because of highly competitive strategic capabilities. The authors test whether capabilities that international business researchers commonly associate with internationalization are necessary at different stages of the internationalization process to better understand the extent to which emerging market (EM) firms need to develop them.Design/methodology/approachInternational business research suggests a positive association between strategic capabilities and firm internalization. However, it remains unclear what specific capabilities are necessary and when they are necessary. These questions are particularly important in the context of the internationalization of firms from emerging economies, such as Latin America. The authors apply necessary condition analysis (NCA) on a sample of Latin American firms at different internationalization stages to test what strategic capabilities represent necessary conditions for becoming a Multilatina.FindingsThe findings suggest that only a few strategic capabilities are necessary for Latin American firms to become “Multilatinas”. While entrepreneurial orientation and marketing and sales capabilities represent necessary conditions, EM firms may internationalize even though other capabilities are developed to a lesser extent. The authors reflect on how shifts in local markets and technology drive the emergence of different types of Multilatinas.Research limitations/implicationsMeasuring strategic capabilities across multiple EM firms implies a risk that firm-specific aspects are not fully captured. While the authors focused on the comparative competitive strength of capabilities and took great care to minimize measurement error, the authors acknowledge possible bias. Also, while NCA does not require a minimum sample size, findings from our sample of firms from four countries may not generalize to the region or other EMs.Originality/valueAs a relatively new statistical technique, the use of NCA has spread rapidly. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the linkage between organizational capabilities and firm internationalization has not been tested from a necessary conditions perspective yet. The reflections on the “Multilatina” concept based on the notion of EM firms as configurations of strategic capabilities inform current debates on EM multinational enterprises.

Generic interpretations of possessive recursion in English-speaking children

Two-part s-possessives such as the dad’s kid’s bike admit at least two distinct interpretations: the dad has a kid who has a bike, or the dad has a bike that is made for kids. We propose that the former interpretation derives from recursively embedding DP-possessives, and the latter from representing kid’s bike as a generic NP-possessive. Accordingly, in the right context, two-part s-possessives are fully ambiguous for adults between ‘recursive’ and ‘generic’ readings. These readings can be disambiguated syntactically. Consider the difference in meaning when we insert a relative clause and extract the constituent kid’s bike — the kid’s bike that is the dad’s — versus when we extract the head noun bike — the bike that is the dad’s kid’s. Our story-based experiment demonstrates that 4-7-year-olds (N=79) and adults (N=68) strongly favor (~80%) the generic interpretation of phrases like the kid’s bike that is the dad’s, as the A-over-A constraint blocks the extraction of a DP-possessive out of a recursive DP. Similarly, adults show a strong preference (~80%) for recursive interpretations of phrases like the bike that is the dad’s kid’s, as the A-over-A constraint blocks the extraction of the head noun bike out of the generic NP-possessive kid’s bike. However, 4-5-year-olds admit generic readings of these recursive phrases 54% of the time; it is not until 6 or 7 years that children show an adult-like preference for the recursive interpretation (~80%). These data support two complementary claims. First, that recursive possessives are acquired late on account of their syntax, and second that children, like adults, represent generic possessives under a different syntactic node than regular possessives.

Zeugen gesucht! Zur Geschichte des generischen Maskulinums im Deutschen

On the basis of synchronic and diachronic data, we argue that in the human domain German masculine nouns commonly display a “non-male” generic interpretation which we take as evidence for a separation of syntactic and semantic gender: synchronically, we s

Are Generics Defaults? A Study on the Interpretation of Generics and Universals in 3 Age-Groups of Spanish-Speaking Individuals

ABSTRACT This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigers have stripes and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripes was acquired in Spanish-speaking children of two different age groups (4/5-year-olds and 8/9-year-olds), and then compare these results with those of adults. The starting point of this research was the semantic distinction between GS and UQS in that the former admit exceptions, unlike the latter. On the other hand, several authors have observed a Generic overgeneralization effect (GOG) consisting in allowing for UQS to be felicitous in the face of exceptions, thus proposing that this “error” stems from GS being defaults (simpler, more easily learned and processed). In the current paper we aimed to test the “Generics as Default” (GaD) hypothesis by comparing GS and UQS in three different age ranges. Our data show that, overall, the accuracy of GS is greater than the accuracy of UQS. Moreover, we also confirm a hypothesized interaction between age and NP type (GS vs UQS). Further, we present several data points that are not predicted by the GaD, including an observed decline in the accuracy of GS in the older group of children as well as in adults, and that children fail at rejecting statements that are not considered to be true generalizations.

The syntax of generics and the absence of generic articles

Cross-linguistically, no language has a dedicated generic article. To address why this is, I decompose GEN into its quantificational and modal components and locate them inside nominal structure. Adopting an event licensing analysis of pre- and post-verbal bare subjects in Modern Hebrew, I use the restriction of pre-verbal bare subjects to generic interpretations and unacceptability of pre-verbal bare singulars to argue that the quantificational component of GEN is best analyzed as a D-quantifier. Evidence from adnominal conditionals further identifies a modal source for GEN within the nominal, which I suggest is adjectival and derived from a reduced relative clause source. I propose that the formation of generic articles is blocked by the non-local (e.g. non-spanning) relationship between these quantificational and modal components.

Expressão do valor genérico nos provérbios portugueses e croatas

Starting from the hypothesis that proverbs represent prototypes of generic sentences and considering that, in our view, they have not been properly studied in the field of linguistics (especially Croatian linguistics), we propose in this work to reflect on the mechanisms that convey the generic value of proverbs. We believe that the generic interpretation in a proverbial context arises from the interaction of several factors – from the linguistic (semantic-pragmatic) ones to certain conceptual mechanisms. At the linguistic level, genericity is actualized in the behavior of several grammatical categories, from nouns and noun phrases, adverbial adjuncts, determiners and quantifiers, and temporal, aspectual and modal values, to the interpropositional relations that represent “type-situations”. For the purposes of this work, we focused on the noun phrase (in the subject position), an aspect that we find relevant even in terms of comparing Portuguese and Croatian proverbial texts, due to the differences between these two languages in the expression of the category (in)determination. The problematization of the properties of the subject noun phrase necessarily requires considering the semantic nature of predications. Since genericity is a linguistic, but also a logical and conceptual “universal”, we propose to investigate the mechanisms in which it is actualized in (European) Portuguese and Croatian proverbs

Generic Interpretation of the Performance of Passive Earth Observation Sensors

Generic Interpretation of the Performance of Passive Earth Observation Sensors

The Kid’s Kid(’s) Bed: Generic or Possessive? A Mandarin Insight

The recursive computational mechanism generates an infinite range of expressions. However, little is known about how different concepts interact with each other within recursive structures. The current study investigated how Mandarin-speaking children dealt with possessives and generics in recursive structures. The picture-matching task showed that Mandarin-speaking children 4 to 6 had a bias for generics in ambiguous possessive constructions in Mandarin, where the genitive maker was covert (e.g., Yuehan de baobao chuang John’s kid bed, where baobao chuang kid bed has both a generic interpretation and a referential interpretation). It was found that that Mandarin-speaking children below 6 had a non-recursive interpretation of the possessive John’s kid(’s) bed, and instead understand kid’s bed to refer generically to a type of bed. This finding suggests that semantics does not parallel syntax in the acquisition of indirect recursion, in line with the prediction of the generic-as-default hypothesis which claims that generics are the default mode of representation of ambiguous statements when the statement can be either generic or non-generic. The delayed recursive possessive interpretation suggests that the full determiner phrase is acquired later than a noun phrase modification, which is universal in all languages. We also discuss the role of the overt functional category in the acquisition of indirect recursion.

La empresa pública en primer plano: una revisión de la nueva agenda de investigación en Europa y América Latina

Despite the inescapable relevance of public enterprises in the world's economies, the researchers who have devoted themselves to their study coincide in pointing out a historiographic and conceptual void around the subject and stress the importance of promoting research that will allow the accumulation of a considerable base of empirical studies to overcome generic interpretations and develop specific bodies of theory. In this sense, considering the aforementioned vacancy and the relating degree of dispersion in the contributions, this article proposes to comprehensively review the emergence of a recent and prolific research agenda, particularly located in Europe and Latin America, with substantial findings for the study of public enterprises and whose systematization allows identifying common aspects that, so far, have been disarticulated. Among the main conclusions is the origin of public enterprises with the emergence of the Nation-States stands out. This is central to an assessment of privatizations, because the projects that defended market solutions were based on the false postulate that state-owned enterprises originate and grow only with the left-wing or interventionist governments. In addition, they provide empirical evidence that shows there is no strict coincidence between political cycles and the evolution of the growth of firms; on the contrary, their development responds to very heterogeneous factors. Based on this “ideological stigma” attached to public enterprises, a series of myths about their supposedly inefficient operation are sustained. However, the studies examined show that ownership is just one more element within the multiplicity of factors involved in business performance and highlight central aspects of public administration, such as governance, state capacities, or what that some authors call entrepreneurship, although these are still open debates, the nuances of which are systematized throughout the work. These approaches are linked to analyses of the new formats of the 21st century, very different from the traditional state monopoly, in which public and private capital appear combined and competing in liberalized international markets.

Children’s subjects in Clitic Left Dislocations in Italian

The study examined the production of subjects by Italian-speaking children in different pragmatic contexts which elicited the use of Clitic Left Dislocations (ClLD), pronoun structures and passives. The analysis takes into account the data from Belletti & Manetti (2019) and focuses on the use of lexical and null subjects on the basis of the discourse conditions provided in two elicited production experiments. The results showed that children are adult-like in their use of lexical and pronominal null subjects in different structures. Experiment 1 specifically confirms this ability as children mainly used overt lexical subjects in order to be completely informative about which character performed a given action on the object topic patient. In Experiment 2, however, children displayed a different choice in subject selection, overwhelmingly preferring null plural subjects with a generic interpretation in their ClLDs, resulting in Obj-pro.PL-Cl V sentences. Under the featural Relativized Minimality principle, we suggest that this choice, which led to overall felicitous answers, was preferred since it made the subject in their ClLDs somewhat lighter and created a feature disjunction configuration which is fully mastered by children. Overall, this study investigated how monolingual children deal with the use of different types of subjects in a production study and could provide a baseline measure to extend the analysis to bilingual or L2 production of overt lexical vs. null pronominal subjects in the specific context of ClLDs.

Stoichiometry and molecular dynamics of anhydride-cured epoxy resin incorporating octa-glycidyl POSS Co-Monomer

The influence of octa-glycidyl (OG) cubic silsesquioxane and reaction stoichiometry (stoichiometry factor, SF) on the cure chemistry and molecular dynamics of an anhydride-cured epoxy resin is reported. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy revealed that an excess of epoxide groups suppresses esterification, as does the substitution of the epoxy pre-polymer with OG. Suppressed glass transition temperature (Tg) is reported for any given SF on addition of OG; these results are supported by the dielectric α relaxation behaviour. System-to-system network variations arising from changes in the degree of esterification and etherification are not sufficient to form discrete dielectric β processes. Finally, we propose a generic interpretation for the γ dielectric relaxation involving both competing origins reported in the literature, namely γ1 (local motions of main-chain segments) and γ2 (unreacted moieties). These attributions explain the observed dielectric features and relate these to the chemical composition of each system.

(No) competition between deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives in Spanish

This paper explores the distribution of deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives that are built on transitive verbs and occur in eventive interpretations. The study is empirically oriented and based on an acceptability judgment experiment in which argument realization and interpretational possibilities are manipulated as the independent variables. The results show that deverbal nouns prefer but are not limited to realizing the lower argument of the base, whereas nominalized infinitives are mostly restricted to realizing the higher argument. Furthermore, deverbal nouns turn out to be insensitive with regard to the distinction between episodic and generic event readings, while nominalized infinitives are shown to be specialized on generic interpretations. Deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives are, thus, mostly neither paradigmatically interchangeable nor complementarily distributed as nominalized infinitives reach the same degree of acceptability as deverbal nouns only under very narrow conditions. With regard to the ecological validity of the experimental approach, a comparison to corpus data indicates that high frequency clearly correlates with acceptability, but that the same does not hold for low frequency and unacceptability, that is forms that are not (sufficiently) attested in the corpus do not necessarily receive low ratings within the judgment task. The study, thus, also addresses a number of methodological issues in the study of event nominals.

Genericity in L2 French and L3 English: a pragmatic deficit with a semantic consequence

ABSTRACT This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in L2 French and L3 English. While some exponents become generic by assembling morphological, syntactic and discursive cues, definite singular nominals additionally require the well-established kind restriction. It is a pragmatic and language-specific constraint. The participants are L1 Arabic adults advanced in L2 French, L1 Arabic-L2 French adults advanced in L3 English, French controls and English controls. An acceptability judgement interpretation task shows that the learners develop nativelike interpretation of well-established kind definite generics that cluster morphological, semantic and discourse cues. However, they interpret non-well-established nominals generically in violation of the pragmatic restriction. Thus, a deficit in pragmatic knowledge leads to the semantic misinterpretation of non-generic nominals in the L2/L3 interlanguage. The study suggests that language-specific pragmatic properties are subject to differential acquisition compared to other properties, even if they all belong to the same external interface. The deficit is due to L1 Arabic transfer. The study claims that pragmatic properties that determine interpretation outcomes are eventually acquirable. Finally, the outcome of L3 acquisition may be another instance of L2 acquisition at the advanced stages. The L2 and L3 ultimate attainment grammar is similar, in terms of knowledge of genericity.

El papel de la interacción en la expresión de sujetos pronominales de segunda persona

El presente estudio describe la alternancia en la expresión (expresión vs. omisión) de sujetos pronominales de segunda persona singular (tú y usted) en datos del español de la Ciudad de México. La selección de estos pronombres se debe a que son parte del sistema de tratamientos y se asume que el hecho de ser empleados para dirigirse al interlocutor favorece su expresión. Por esta razón se realiza un análisis sociolingüístico en el que se incluyen dos factores relacionados con la interacción: la estructura de los turnos de habla y el discurso directo. Los resultados muestran que la toma de turno propicia la expresión de sujetos referenciales de segunda persona singular, dado que en este contexto permiten apelar al interlocutor y estructurar la conversación. Sin embargo, contrario a lo esperado, no es evidente que la necesidad de reproducir la estructura dialógica en las narraciones en discurso directo propicie su expresión. Asimismo, se muestra que cuando los sujetos de segunda persona tienen una interpretación genérica no responden a estas restricciones.

Collective cell mechanics of epithelial shells with organoid-like morphologies

The study of organoids, artificially grown cell aggregates with the functionality and small-scale anatomy of real organs, is one of the most active areas of research in biology and biophysics, yet the basic physical origins of their different morphologies remain poorly understood. Here, we propose a mechanistic theory of epithelial shells which resemble small-organoid morphologies. Using a 3D surface tension-based vertex model, we reproduce the characteristic shapes from branched and budded to invaginated structures. We find that the formation of branched morphologies relies strongly on junctional activity, enabling temporary aggregations of topological defects in cell packing. To elucidate our numerical results, we develop an effective elasticity theory, which allows one to estimate the apico-basal polarity from the tissue-scale modulation of cell height. Our work provides a generic interpretation of the observed epithelial shell morphologies, highlighting the role of physical factors such as differential surface tension, cell rearrangements, and tissue growth.

Troubling the Tragic Paradigm: Genre and Epigraph in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Abstract The rarely discussed epigraph to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles – ‘Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed | Shall lodge thee’ – at first seems an odd choice. Tess is usually read as a tragedy; the epigraph’s source, Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is a comedy. The speaker of these lines in the play is a woman, the ‘wounded name’ a man’s, and the immediate context one of erotic playfulness as Julia tears up Proteus’s love letter and then tenderly gathers up the fragments. Yet the apparent mismatch works, because it gestures towards both the generic instability of Two Gentlemen, and the novel’s own unstable genre. Hardy recurrently raises the question of how Tess Durbeyfield’s story should be read. Tess’s ‘fall’ is at different times and for different people a fatal blot on her prospects, a venial error, and material for an amusing or satirical story. Novel and heroine hover between genres; generic interpretations are complicated by gender and class. Early reviewers who refused to read Tess as a tragedy may seem wrong-headed and puritanical in hindsight, but they were in some ways more alive to the novel’s generic slippages than many later readers. Hardy at once invokes and unsettles generic models, in his choice of epigraph and throughout the book.

Terry Pratchett’s thought experiments about the body

Terry Pratchett was a fertile fantasy writer whose forty-one Discworld novels contain several fascinating philosophical ideas about the body. Although the magic, unnatural character of the represented world may ignite generic or allegorical interpretations, in this paper I interpret some subtexts and subplots as thought experiments. Focusing on the body, I will discuss the golems as an experimentation with perfect labor, labor rights, and ownership of the body, while an ongoing golem subplot in Making Money experiments with engendering. Igors are a kind of species in the Discworld, through which Pratchett can investigate the questions of bodily identity in the age of advanced transplantation technology. In Unseen Academicals, a personalized myth of the orcs gives him the opportunity to reason about genetic design and its interaction with socialization and education policy, and to do so while also considering the moral and social risks.

Domain Restriction in Generic Statements

ABSTRACT Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., everyone) and noun phrases (e.g., the girls). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces a topic situation, is the preferred context for interpreting the domain of subject noun phrases in the same sentence or a subsequent sentence. In this research, the sentences and minidiscourses were about concrete nongeneric situations. The present article reports three experiments designed to explore domain restriction in generic statements. Experiment 1 shows that indefinite determiners and the presence of a modal (would) favor generic interpretations. In Experiments 2 and 3 a sentence initial (vs. sentence final) PP increased interpretation of the subject as being restricted to the topic situation as well as increasing the frequency of generic interpretations. We propose that in sentences with modals (would) the initial PP acts as the antecedent of a conditional. Furthermore, based on differences in responses depending on whether the genericity of the subject or the temporal restriction on the subject are posed, we suggest that domain restriction is an inference from the representation constructed during discourse comprehension while a decision about genericity is a part of core sentence interpretation.