Genericity in language. Issues of syntax logical form and interpretation

This contribution deals with the semantic manifestations and the syntactic encoding of genericity in natural language – that is, with sentences that express some kind of regularity and normativity, abstracting away from reference to specific events or facts. Assuming as a starting point the most valuable achievements of the current literature on genericity – in particular the distinction between sentence-level and NP-level genericity – this book aims at decomposing genericity into its modular components, by means of a detailed examination of the contribution of grammatical aspect – in particular imperfectivity – and of the internal syntax of noun phrases. The result is an updated Carlsonian analysis according to which generic sentences are categorical statements ascribing properties to a subject of predication. Theoretically, this case-study intends to argue in favor of an approach to the semantics of natural language that assigns a central position to the issues of logical form – in full agreement with Davidsons program in semantics – and in favor of the view that many issues of logical form can be successfully dealt with only by taking into account the contribution of formal syntax.

This chapter covers the syntax of the Groovy programming language. ... Text literals are represented in the form of chain of characters called strings. ... Groovy offers three logical operators for boolean expressions: ... The spread operator is null-safe, meaning that if an element of the collection is null, it will return null instead ... Syntax errors are mistakes in the use of the Python language, and are analogous to ... execution if it encounters a runtime error – a problem which was not detected when the ... The error is caused by a mistake in the program's logic. ... have been moved or deleted, and the user may enter data which is not in the right format.