Stability and variation in article choice: generic and episodic contexts

Abstract

To appear in M. Rathert and A. Giannakidou (eds.). Quantification, Definiteness, and Nominalization, Oxford University Press (to appear) In Farkas and de Swart (2006), we proposed an analysis of the cross-linguistic variation in article choice in plural generics. In this paper, we develop an extended version of the analysis which accounts for cross-linguistic stability in article choice in episodic contexts and in singular generics in languages with definite and indefinite articles, such as English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Greek and Hungarian.