Recent work on generics has shown that genericity is not a uniform phenomenon but involves interaction between the semanLJcs of the noun phrase and the tense-aspect system of a language (see Krifka 1992 for a survey and discussion). This paper focuses on the gencricity which is tied to the noun phrase. By this I mean NP's which can serve as arguments to true kind predicates such as extinct. As noted by Krifk.a. this diagnostic distinguishes the definite singular NP and the bare plural in English from the indefinite singular NP. While the former are truly kind denoting, the latter is not. as shown by the fact that ( Ic) has only a taxonomic reading:
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Veneeta Dayal (1992) studied this question.
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