Mass Terms and Model-Theoretic Semantics (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 42) - Hardcover

Bunt, Harry C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052125681X ISBN 13: 9780521256810

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1985

Synopsis

'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.

About this title

Book Description

Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem of 'mass terms' and offers an original and detailed solution. 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.

Synopsis

'Mass terms', words 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 viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating 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, and this provides the conceptual 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 formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1985
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052125681X
• ISBN 13: 9780521256810
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 338