Genericity has recently become a central topic of debate in both linguistics and cognitive science.
The set of questions addressed in the two disciplines stems from the foundational work in The Generic Book (Carlson and Pelletier, 1995), most notably from the idea that generic sentences involve a generic quantifier GEN.
This hypothesis, which has led the research on generics across languages for thirty years, is now being reconsidered, and linguists have attempted to locate the root of genericity by considering the sources of the generic interpretation of the sentences. A recent publication in the domain (Mari, Beyssade, Del Prete, 2012), dedicated to discussion about the sources of generic interpretation, has identified three of these sources, in the subject phrase, in the verb phrase, and at the sentence level. The question of the interface between the cognitive and linguistic aspects of the interpretation of generic sentences is nonetheless not addressed.
In the meanwhile, cognitive...