Generics are not quantificational: A new path from language models to semantic theory

Generic sentences express generalizations that tolerate exceptions without explicitly communicating information about quantities. Whether generics semantically encode information about quantities implicitly is controversial. This work takes a large-scale distributional approach to the semantic debate. It compares thousands of naturally occurring generics and quantificational sentences using language-model probabilities. It shows that language models recover many semantic facts about quantifiers. It also shows that they recover semantic facts about surface distributional differences between generics and their "quantificational counterparts". Accordingly, and contrary to dominant views in other fields, we formulate an empirical argument to the effect that generics are not quantificational.