ERC Advanced Grant · 2016
Forests and Trees: the Formal Semantics of Collective Categorization
Languages have various ways of referring to collections like families, herds and forests. The grammatical properties of collective expressions critically determine how we understand them. The sentences “this forest is old” and “these trees are old” categorize an arboreal collection using a concept (“old”), while conveying different meanings. This semantic difference correlates with the difference in grammatical number between the sentences: singular vs. plural. Such effects of collective categorization in language are crucial for understanding the connections between grammar and the mind, as well as for artificial intelligence. However, currently little is known about the mechanisms…
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