Dual Character Concept Terms: A New Case for Polysemy

The claim that dual-character concept terms are polysemous is often understood to be supported solely on the basis that it provides an elegant explanation of the normativity of normative generics. Understood so narrowly, this hypothesis has been vulnerable to challenges from competitor views that purport to explain normative generics equally well. This paper offers new, independent evidence for the polysemy of dual-character concept terms—namely that they are linguistically marked in other languages such as French and Spanish. I argue that this data puts pressure on competitor accounts, showing polysemy to be the strongest explanation for the linguistic behaviour of dual-character concept terms and the expressions containing them.