Is the weak definite a generic? An experimental investigation

We discuss the properties of weak definite noun phrases, definite noun phrases
(henceforth DP) which do not uniquely refer to an individual referent. Since one of
the properties of generic noun phrases is that they do not uniquely refer, we asked
whether weak definites might in fact be a form of generic noun phrase. We adopted
a quantitative and experimental approach conducting a corpus analysis and four
experiments that were designed to assess whether weak definites differ from DPs
that are generic, weak and regular definites. A corpus analysis by de Sá et al. (2016)
showed that generic DPs and weak definites are not in complementary distribution.
A follow-up analysis on verb aktionsart showed that most weak definites appear in
telic or activity DPs. The experiments also compared matched sentences with weak,
regular and generic reading DPs. These studies do not find similarities between
weak definites and generics. We conclude that weak definite noun phrases are not
generics.