The Semantic Study of Generics

Abstract

This paper makes efforts to reveal cognitive motivation of generics, holding that generics and metonymy are the same in the aspect of categorization and generalization, that generics’ economy expression and incomplete statements are closely related to human’s innately given capacity to generalize from instance to type, or from subtype to type, and communicating economically with least efforts and least expression is universally accepted rather than the vise verse.