On Tense, Aspect and Genericity in English and Romanian: Insights from Language Acquisition

Alexandra Cornilescu and Alexandru Nicolae examine generic sentences in English and Romanian, exploring why children acquire them early despite semantic complexity. They reject traditional quantificational operators, proposing a binary analysis where subjects refer to kinds as conceptual proper names. The study highlights that early acquisition stems from innate inductive learning rather than logical computation. Key differences emerge: English distinguishes generics via aspectual contrasts, whereas Romanian utilizes the obligatory definite article to represent kind-level maximality and sums. THIS ABSTRACT IS GENERATED WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.