The purpose of the present chapter is to present the most important linguistic explanations on the interpretation of masculine role nouns; together with the presentation of empirical findings on the actual interpretation of masculine role nouns, this lays the foundation for my own experimental study presented in Chap. 4 (Experiment 1) and 5 (Experiment 2). Overall, previous research on the interpretation of masculine role nouns can be subdivided into two major groups: one that suggests that masculine role nouns function generically, and one that claims that masculine role nouns are mainly interpreted specifically. These opposing views are presented in Sects. 3.1 and 3.2. More precisely, some of the theoretical approaches and empirical research on the multiple interpretations of masculine role nouns assume that it is mainly linguistic information that influences language users when they interpret a masculine role noun’s reference; these are presented in Sects. 3.1.1 and 3.1.2.