The social (and cultural, and syntactic, and semantic) life of generics

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent work in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology suggests that the distinction between generic and specific (singular) reference is foundational to concept formation, and hence of special interest to social scientists. Generics provide the first-language learner with external evidence of the integrity of a word/concept cluster, partially filling in the scaffolding of concepts. As such, they are replicators, critical to the transmission of concepts across populations and across time. Generics are tacitly normative. As they refer to the constitutive properties of a concept rather than to its object, they tell us what—in a given social setting—a proper instance of the concept should look like. Generics sustain and reproduce social stereotypes, including—and perhaps especially—ethnoracial, class, and gender stereotypes. (Generics, conceptual formation, ethnography, tokenization, materiality)*