A Cognitive Approach to Genericity in Norwegian
A Cognitive Approach to Genericity in Norwegian

Author(s): Anna Kurek-Przybilski
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Genericity in Norwegian; Cognitive analysis; Noun phrase types; Language generalisations; Cognitive model of genericity
Summary/Abstract: Publication available under license Attribution 4.0 International (BY 4.0).This is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation Generics in Norwegian –A Cognitive Analysis. I defended the thesis in October 2020 at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The goal of this book is to show how genericityfunctions in the Norwegian language and how it is rendered in the cognitiveframework.Genericity as a language phenomenon is regarded as the ability to talkabout kinds and to make generalisations about people, objects and events.The possibility to make such generalisations is known to be present in alllanguages (see Chapters 1 and 2). However, the way it is expressed may varyfrom language to language. In Germanic languages, and therefore also inNorwegian, genericity is expressed mainly with the use of different nounforms. When it comes to Norwegian, there are five noun phrase (NP) typesthat can be used generically and these are: bare noun, indefinite singular,definite singular, indefinite plural, and definite plural.All of the forms listed above can be used in a number of contexts, notonly the generic ones. In this study, a number of generic texts are analysed,together with feedback from native speakers of Norwegian, in order to determine whether there are certain contexts in which given NP types occuras generic. In the last section of the book, a cognitive model of such contextswas created (see Chapter 7), based on the models of Radden 2009, Pettersson1976, and Leslie et al. 2011.

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