Generic Comparisons

Abstract

The paper discusses comparative generic sentences As are F-er than Bs—girls do better than boys in grade school, for example—which pose severe problems for extant accounts. In their stead, the paper proposes reconceiving the LF of generic sentences as more closely akin to that of sentences containing non-generic plurals, paradigmatically plural definite descriptions. Given this one crucial change, several otherwise puzzling features of comparative generics are immediately explicable, including their relatively weak truth conditions and some of the logical relations they enter into.