Sentence examples for generic sentences from inspiring English sources

Mass nouns can also be used in generic sentences, which express generalizations: Gold is metal.

However, in the execution, there is a curious lack of specificity, resulting in too many generic sentences like these: "The air itself is magical".

So one would need a semantics for generic sentences to check, for instance, if this reasoning is validated: This is gold.

At the sentential level, even for a determinate parse there may be quantifier scope ambiguities ("Every man admires a certain woman"—Rosa Parks vs. his mother); and habitual and generic sentences often involve temporal/atemporal ambiguities ("Racehorses are (often) skittish"), among others.

One reason may be that donkey anaphora rarely occurs in the text corpora most intensively investigated by computational linguists so far (though it is arguably pervasive and extremely important in generic sentences and generic passages, including those found in lexicons or sources such as Common Sense Open Mind see sections 4.3 and 8.3).

According to Carlson (1977), a generic sentence is interpreted universally.

Non-standard analysis is an extension of classical analysis in which infinitesimal (the ε and η in the celebrated generic sentence ∀ε∃η… of college maths) can be manipulated as first class citizens.

As Asher and Pelletier (Asher and Pelletier 1997) have argued, the semantics for such sentences seems to involve intentionality: a generic sentence can be true even if the majority of the kind, or even all of the kind, fail to conform to the generalization.