@inproceedings{calder-on-etal-2026-generics,
    title = "Generics are not quantificational: A new path from language models to semantic theory",
    author = "Calder{\textbackslash}'on, Gustavo Cilleruelo  and
      Almotahari, Mahrad  and
      Allaway, Emily  and
      Haddow, Barry  and
      Birch, Alexandra",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1100/",
    pages = "21875--21892",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Generic sentences express generalizations that tolerate exceptions without explicitly communicating information about quantities. For example, the sentence Ravens are black is true even though there are albino ravens. The sentence doesn{'}t explicitly communicate the number or frequency of black ravens. 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."
}