9309332 Carlson 8 ) Abstract In a discourse, a fundamental relation is for one unit a sentence, a clause, or a sequence of sentences to be subordinate to another unit. This observation is common to all approaches to the study of discourse. In this project, however, we focus on a construction we dub "generic passages," and consider how best to represent the relation within a formal semantic framework. In the first sections of the project, we review some of the salient grammatical and semantic properties of generic passages. We then pose a question for which there is conflicting evidence: the substance of this project is to resolve the conflict, We briefly outline two different approaches that promise to resolve the conflicts, and seek evidence for deciding between them or for showing both deficient. A generic passage is a unit of discourse in which an initial sentence introduces a pattern of events, the details of which are expanded on in the ensuing sequence of sentences. An example is given in (1). 1.a. X My grandmother used to bake special fruit pies every Saturday. % b. X She went to the orchard on Shady Lane early in the morning. % c. She then used to pick a basket each of apples and peaches. d. X Then she would go into the kitchen and shoo everyone else away. % e. X About 4:00 an irresistible aroma would waft through the entire house. % This project is aimed at understanding the character of these and similar discourse units within a formal semantics framework, in order to more fully understand the nature of the structures and processes that create discou rse. In working on a narrowly focused problem, we are able to formulate questions and proposal with a precision that is much more difficult to achieve taking a much broader perspective. The primary interest of such passages is how they fit in with a semantic theory of sentences that express generalizations, generic sentences, as opposed to those that express information about particular instances of things that happened. Based on extensive previous research, we assume that there is a generic operator active in the construction of such discourses, and the investigation of these discourses promises to shed some light on the semantics of that operator. One of the main issues this research encounters, however, is the question of whether formal processes that hold within sentences may, at times, also hold between different units in a discourse. If this is sustained, it requires that discourse be granted some level of syntactic structure, and hence it cannot be considered a string of sentence meanings alone that are related to one another.
