Generic Thinking And Generic Sentences

Generic sentences are those which base their understanding on the classification of things. A generic sentence is always involved in summarizing regularities, properties or characteristics of a class of objects or concepts. The function of generic sentences is to describe a specific class in a specific context, the process of which reflects human cognition of class of things in a hierarchical way.Generic sentences demonstrate a remarkable feature of"exception-toleration"; that is, this kind of sentences will arrive, from the widely accepted premises and through correct and reasonable logical reasoning process, at conclusions which seem contradictory to common sense. In other words, they cognitively tolerate the counter-examples or exceptions. Although generics can never bear scrutiny as to the facts they state, people would not suspect the truthfulness of the statements of these sentences, and do not feel problematic with them. For example, when we hear people say"Birds fly", we are ready to ignore the fact that an ostrich that is always recognized as a bird cannot fly and still believe that the judgment is true. So far as we know, most of the researches in the field of generic sentences concentrate their efforts only on the analyses of their logic characterization, but few pay attention to the cognitive mechanisms in the generation and comprehension of such sentences.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the present study takes the generic sentences in natural human language as the starting point of the research, proposes a new concept of"generic thinking", probes into the process of categorization in human thinking, and attempts to explain the underlying cognitive mechanisms of generic sentences and its varied form—contradictory statements. The research of generics can be traced back to 1970s. Scholars from different fields, such as linguistics, logic, artificial intelligence, philosophy and psychology discussed the generic phenomena and genericity from different perspectives. The logic studies mainly focus on its definition, the truth value of the bare noun subject in the singular / plural form, and the selection of frequency adverbs, etc. The linguists primarily deal with the semantic relations between the bare noun subject and the predicate of the SP, and its pragmatic characteristics. The psychological studies provide some insights of how children learned generic sentences through psychological experiments. These previous studies seldom touched the underlying mechanisms of toleration of exceptions in generic phenomena shown in generic sentences, which has left us spaces for further investigations into the cognitive mechanisms involved in the generation and comprehension of generic sentences.We take the Mental Model Theory and Type Hierarchy Theory as the main theoretical framework of this study. According to these theories, the human mind is an open complex system and reflects the characteristics of hierarchical classification. The Generative Holism Theory from systematics, Gestalt principles from psychology, embodiment view and some other theories form cognitive linguistics are also used to support our exploration. From above-mentioned theories we weave our unified analytical framework.We hold that the features of generic sentences can be simply summarized as following: firstly, generic sentences express regularities, properties or characteristics of a class of things by viewing the class as a whole; secondly, generic sentences can tolerate exceptions; thirdly, the comprehension of generic sentences reflects a hierarchical understanding of human classification of things. Further more, the truth value of the generic sentences depend not on the particular real-world events but the context. The regularities, properties or characteristics that are expressed by generic sentences are not static but dynamic in nature.Exploring the relationship between language and thought is a task of cognitive linguistic research. We, like all other linguistic researchers, try to explore into the relations between language and human thought. We believe that the existence of generic sentences is based on the generic thinking mechanisms in human cognition. Genericity represented by generic sentences is not a superficial phenomenon of language, but rather a cognitive mode in nature.The previous studies of genericity both at home and abroad have so far not made clear what is"generic thinking", not to say the characteristics, operational procedures and other issues about it. Therefore,"generic thinking"proposed in the present research is innovative. Generic thinking simply means the way of thinking people use to classify things and concepts. More technically, it is the mind process when people make the general description of a class of things and result that is reached as the consequence of the process. Generic thinking reflects the consciousness for hierarchical classification which can guide categorization process and is one of the modes of cognition and thinking. It is a necessary means for the categorization of experience, and also a cognitive tool to guide the knowledge expanding from the known to the unknown.A careful look into the differences between the theory of classic categorization and that of prototype categorization from the perspective of generic thinking will show that the two theories are not antagonistic to each other with one right and the other wrong, but both help in the process of classification of things in the operation of categorization in human mind. People apply the method of classical categorization when they need to describe things precisely and that of prototype categorization gives them an overall grasp of the characteristics of things by making less cognitive efforts. Although the prototype categorization theory and the classical categorization theory seem contradictory, they are in fact just two sides of a coin, i.e. they reveal different sides of the generic thinking process.Following the route of"language -- linguistic theories -- language", the present research firstly probes into generic sentences and generic phenomena, then explores the cognitive characteristics of generic thinking and the process of categorization, and finally returns to the explanation of the underlying exception-toleration mechanisms in the comprehension of generic sentences and its varied form—contradictory statements. With the help of the analytical framework hypothesized in the present study, we carefully investigate the process of generic sentences in its generation and comprehension, and find that generic sentences can tolerate exceptions in logical derivation is just the result of people's categorization processing of the concept involved in the generic subject by way of selecting the different strategies, i.e. selecting either strategy of classical categorization or that of prototype categorization according to dividing and sifting steps of the semantic factors. The exception-toleration mechanisms underlying the understanding of contradictory statements are similar to that of generic sentences.