Polysemy and Countability in Abstract Nouns

Overview

The PCAN project concerns polysemy (the different, but interrelated senses that expressions have) and countability (whether or not an expression individuates and makes accessible to the grammar a set of countable entities). One of the novel aspects of the PCAN project is that these two phenomena are investigated in relation to abstract nouns (nouns that do not denote either concrete things or stuff).

Some of the immediate questions that arise regarding abstract nouns are:

• What types of things do different senses of abstract nouns denote?

• How can we individuate or count those abstract things?

• Is there a relation between the kinds of things denoted and whether or not we can count them?

Polysemy and countability for concrete nouns:

Most, if not all common nouns in natural language display some amount of polysemy. I.e., they can be used with distinct, but interrelated meanings:

Aside from nouns denoting food and drink, it is quite rare to find nouns that are polysemous and have both a count sense and a mass sense e.g.,

• stone: (i) a bit/piece of rock (count); (ii) the rocky stuff (mass)

Furthermore, these count and mass senses apply to the same type of things/stuff.

Abstract nouns are different

Abstract nouns denote neither concrete objects (chairs, books etc.), nor undifferentiated stuff (air, water etc.).

Like concrete nouns, abstract nouns are often polysemous but also:

1. Abstract nouns very often have some senses that are countable and some that are not.

2. These senses range over different types of things.

For example:

• belief: (i) a proposition/statement that is believed (count, two beliefs); (ii) the state of mind/disposition of believing something (mass)

• truth: (i) a proposition or statement that is true (count, truths vs. falsehoods); (ii) the state of conformity to reality (mass, #uncover the truths)

• experience: (i) a situation/event that was undergone (count, an interesting experience); (i) the knowledge, sensation or information gained from undergoing situations/events (mass, a lot of experience)

A systematic phenomenon?

This project seeks to uncover what the underlying mechanisms are that allow us to make predictions regarding the senses of abstract nouns used in context. Some factors to be investigated are:

• Number marking - is the noun used in the singular or plural?

• Countability - is the noun used in a count, mass, or count-mass neutral construction?

• Related verb class (if any) - is the noun deverbal? If so what is the aspectual class of this verb?

• Type of the entity that can be denoted - does the sense of the noun denote propositions, eventualities (events, processes or states), or something else?

Methodology

A combination of corpus based analyses and probabilistic semantics and pragmatics will be used:

• Corpus analyses: To estimate the priors, for abstract nouns with respect to what their denotation type is. For example, for evidence, distributional methods will be used to estimate whether this expression is being used to refer to a proposition (the evidence she gave was true), an eventuality (her evidence lasted three hours), or a physical entity (the police found evidence at the scene).

• Probabilistic semantics: Semantic representations of abstract nouns will be given in a probabilistic richly-typed formalism such as TTR (Type Theory with Records, Cooper 2012, Cooper et al. 2015, a.m.o). The reason for this is to enable the representation of polysemy in the lexicon in such as way as the probability of one sense being selected over another may be inferred based upon the sentential context and the wider context of use.

• Probabilistic pragmatics: The stochastic semantic representations will be passed to a Bayesian pragmatics model (see, e.g., Frank and Goodman 2012; Goodman and Lassiter 2015, Lassiter and Goodman 2015), in order to attempt to infer what the denotation type of an abstract noun is, given, amongst others, the aforementioned factors (number-marking, cointability, related verb class).

Peter Sutton receives funding for this project via the Beatriu de Pinós award funded by the Secretary of Universities and research (Government of Catalonia) and from the Horizon 2020 programme of research and innovation of the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no 801370.

Image credits: Creative commons, Julius Schorzman, Zimmermanns,