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Generics are sentences expressing the general claims about the members of a kind, such as“birds fly”,“chickens lay eggs”, and“mosquitoes carry the West Nile Virus”, which are commonplace in everyday conversation and some encyclopedic readings. The main feature of generics is to exist and tolerate exceptions. Since at least the 70s of last century, generic sentences have aroused the interest of scholars in linguistics, logics, and artificial intelligence, etc. Up to now, many of the researches focus on its logic forms and formal semantic analysis, while few researches involve in the underlying cognitive mechanisms of generics. In recent years, with the development of cognitive science, some scholars have begun to study generics from a cognitive point of view, but these studies are not thorough and in-depth enough, so that a number of particular generics cannot receive a good explanation. Based on the previous studies, the cognitive mechanisms applied to the comprehension of different types of generics are analyzed in this thesis, with the purpose to explore the cognitive basis of generics on a deeper level. In addition, a couple of questionnaires are also adopted to get the truth of understanding generics between Chinese and foreign students in this study, as well as the relevant factors affecting the comprehension of generics. Besides, this study expands the application of prototype theory, and also has some practical values for the semantic annotation of generics and the development of artificial intelligence.The results of this study show that categories are organized around the central prototypes, with a cognitive structure of multi-dimensional and multi-level sub-prototypes, and the exemplar information concerning some particular experiences is also retained in this prototypical structure. According to the experience with the exemplars of a category, one would create a central representation or prototype in his mind, and then would understand a class of things based on the prototype representation. Generally, there are three different ways to acquire the prototype of a kind– the accumulation of features, the learning of exemplars and the learning of definition. The information acquired in different ways is eventually generalized into the prototype structure of the kind. In addition, we find that the comprehension of generics is closely related to the basis of knowledge and/or experience, while the differences of experiential basis would further affect the understanding models for different types of generics; one prefers to have a default reasoning with prototypical expectations when understanding generics, and often adopts a model of“receiving information→psychological program selection→cognitive program selection→making judgment”, however, for particular generics, the models are a little different with regard to the experience or ways of comprehension; besides, due to the individual differences in experience, one might understand generics in the model of strict logic reasoning, and at this moment, we usually refuse to accept the generic sentences.This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter One introduces the general background of the study, together with its motivation, significance, methodology and organizational structure. Chapter Two is the literature review, mainly presenting the existing approaches to generics in three aspects: rules, probability and cognition. Chapter Three is the theoretical basis of this study, in which the acquisition of prototype categories is analyzed, the prototype cognitive structure is explored, and the cognitive structures of prototype categories are constructed. Chapter Four, respectively, provides a detailed exposition for the cognitive mechanisms of understanding different kinds of generics, on the basis of statistical data analysis. In Chapter Five, a conclusion is drawn.
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