Genericity in Spanish: a contrastive perspective with Chinese

Abstract

The concept of genericity exists in all human languages. In this article we studied the different generic forms in Spanish, not only revealing its semantic and syntactic features, but also analyzing it from a contrastive perpective with Chinese. We found that in Chinese, a language without the article system, there are also similar forms expressing the genericity, which are the bare nouns, the structure with the numeral yī (one) -- yī + Cl + N and the structure with the demonstratives and the special classifiers that express classes o species -- zhè (this)/ nà (that) + zhǒng (class)/ lèi(specie) + N. We noted that the different generic forms, whether in Spanish or in Chinese, present some nuances considering the cognitive semantics approach. In addition, they suffer limitations when they occupy different syntactic positions in a sentence. Reviewing “The Hypothesis of the Genericity’s Universality in Chinese Bare Nouns” proposed by Liu (2002), we try to present our own new proposal that we call “The Hypothesis of Latent Geneticity in Spanish Bare Nouns”. This theory contributes to a better explanation to the semantic and syntactic features of the genericity in Spanish.