The meaning of GENERIC in linguistics (one last word for now)

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:38 PM -0500 3/5/05, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>I agree with Larry that maybe it is time to stop this thread for now (or take
>it private), so I will add only two quick comments myself.
>
>1. I did find two instances of "autohyponymy" through Google, one of which
>defined it as the case where "the new sense of a term is a hyponym of the
>original."

...which doesn't quite work, since half (or so) of the cases involve
those in which the new sense is the superordinate and the older one
is the hyponym, as with "guy(s)", "Roman" [for inhabitants of the
empire rather than the city], and the full range of
antonomasia/genericide examples we've been rehashing.  But I do like
the query from google about whether I meant to search "autohypnose",
which I guess involves hypnotizing yourself in French.  Close enough.

>  I now see that this is a term of his own creation and that at least two
>other linguists have also used it since 1984. It looks like a useful term to
>me, so I'm glad he coined it and I am sure I will use it from now on
>whenever I
>am in need of such a word, even though this use of <auto-> strikes me as
>somewhat eccentric compared to the use in, say, "autoerotic" or
>"automobile" (just
>a matter of taste, of course).

Yeah, it's a challenge to come up with a plausible scenario for
autohyponymic asphyxiation.

>
>2. I thank Larry for reminding me that the term GENERIC is also used in
>morphology to refer to nouns and pronouns that are putatively
>sex-neutral. I agree
>with him that "The issue of (intended or purported) sex-neutrality overlaps
>perniciously with that of morphological genericity (the bare singular
>illustrated above) as well as (ordinary) semantic genericity, of the
>type Ron alludes
>to." The operative word here is, as I see it, "perniciously."
>Indeed, so far as
>I can see, the only thing of importance that these three quite different
>phenomena have in common is the label GENERIC. The relationship
>between "Kleenex"
>and putative "kleenex" does not seem to me to be illuminated in the slightest
>by confusing the issue with either of the other two uses of "GENERIC."

I think it would be relatively straightforward to refer to the first
of these as "sex-neutral(ity)", but I'm not sure we can avoid using
the now very well-established "generic" for the other two.  Maybe we
could use "bare singular (count noun)" (BSCN?) for the "man" and
"woman" cases.  Semantic genericity itself is a many-splendored
thing, though, including the varieties of NPs involved (the
similarities and differences among bare plurals (Cats are
carnivores), indefinite singulars (A cat is a carnivore), and
definite singulars (The cat is a carnivore) and the role of
"characterizing" sentences. The best treatment I know of is still
that in the now 10-year-old _The Generic Book_ (Carlson & Pelletier,
eds.), which has a plain white cover with block black and red
stenciled letters, making the product look very much like it was
pulled from the Generic aisle of the supermarket.  More recently,
Ariel Cohen has had a lot of useful things to say about generics.
The law literature I don't really know.

Larry