Katrin Schulz (Amsterdam)
How we talk about generalisations: some thoughts about conditionals and generics
(Joint work with Robert van Rooij)In this talk I will start by discussing a well-known challenge for many approaches to indicative conditionals: missing link conditionals. I will propose a solution that takes conditionals to express (causal) generalisations. We will discuss a number of challenges to this proposal and show that the approach has to offer some interesting answers to these challenges. In the second part I will show that this approach can be extended to generic sentences: also they will be analysed as expressing (causal) generalisations. I will conclude by discussing some experimental results testing this approach to generics.