Generics Across Languages
Collaborative project with Matt Husband (University of Oxford), Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary University of London) and Suzi Lima (University of Toronto)
Growing out of my research on generics (e.g.‘Tigers have stripes’ or ‘Hector cycles to nursery’) both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective (see various publications here), investigating generics across a wider range of languages has become the focus of my research.
While much is known about generic expressions in English and a few closely related languages, a significant limitation to our current understanding, and to future research on generics and related research areas, is the lack of wide-ranging typological investigation that systematically examines their different forms across a representative sample of human languages. We started this project to address this gap.
We developed the Generics Toolkit that includes a standard set of genericity phenomena drawn primarily from reviews, sentences we have extracted from the psychological literature eliciting generics with different propositional content and a structured set of open-ended comment sections. Our project recruits linguist consultants who will complete the toolkit in their respective language and/or research assistants who will work with language consultants to elicit data. Our target is 50 languages covering 23 language families, 3 isolates, and 2 sign languages. The toolkit will be accompanied by detailed instructions of use, providing all consultants with the same background and information on the phenomenon.
Related News
March 2024: We were awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to expand our work on this project and cover even more languages! The funding will start in May 2024 and will last for two years. Spring pleasures!
We are currently collecting data on Greek, Japanese, Hungarian, Anaang and Mongolian with the help of our collaborators!
January 2024: I got some pump-priming funding (Annual Adventures in Research Grant at the University of East Anglia) to develop the Generics toolkit and test it in 5 additional languages (February 2024-July 2025). The joy!
July 2023: Matt got some pump-priming funding from the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford to pilot our project in 5 additional languages (August 2023-May 2024). Stay tuned!
May 2023: First in-person project meeting in London.
We met to discuss our pilot, our research plans and our funding applications.
March 2023: We started developing the Generics Toolkit!
Suzi is collaborating with three RAs at the University of Toronto to develop its components and pilot it in two Bantu languages (Kinyarwanda and Tshiluba).
December 2022: Matt and I accepted an invitation to write an article for Language and Linguistics Compass. The title of the article is “Generics: diversity and cross-linguistic variation”
May 2019: Matt and I prepared the first version of the GEN questionnaire based on my initial draft.
June 2017: I organised the workshop ‘The Generic Notebook: current approaches to genericity. More info here.