Mass Terms And Model-theoretic Semantics (cambridge Studies In Linguistics)
by Harry C. Bunt /
1985 / English / DjVu
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'Mass terms' like water, rice and traffic, have proved very
difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike
count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be treated as
denoting sets of individuals. In this study, motivated by the need
to design a computer program for understanding natural language
utterances containing mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough
analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed
solution. An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is
defined. This provides the formal basis of a framework for the
analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls two-level
model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is
convincingly demonstrated by the detailed analysis of a fragment of
English including sentences with quantified and modified mass
terms. This significant advance in our understanding of the formal
syntactic and semantic properties of mass terms will be of interest
not only to linguists and logicians, but also to all those
concerned with the processing of natural language.
'Mass terms' like water, rice and traffic, have proved very
difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike
count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be treated as
denoting sets of individuals. In this study, motivated by the need
to design a computer program for understanding natural language
utterances containing mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough
analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed
solution. An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is
defined. This provides the formal basis of a framework for the
analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls two-level
model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is
convincingly demonstrated by the detailed analysis of a fragment of
English including sentences with quantified and modified mass
terms. This significant advance in our understanding of the formal
syntactic and semantic properties of mass terms will be of interest
not only to linguists and logicians, but also to all those
concerned with the processing of natural language.