Three-and-a-half horses
Formal semantics has some kind of fascination with animals. At some point I plan to list a whole menagerie of examples,1 for which this post is just a taster (so to speak). I found some fresh spoor in the question session of today’s DIP lecture (quotes are approximate, alas):
Fred: We have a theory of plurals, we can talk about three horses, but if you say “After the accident there were three-and-a-half horses,” our plural semantics can’t say anything about that.
Robert: Well no, but that’s because horses have a certain structure.
Notes:
- So far I’ve got donkeys, wolves, elephants, zebras, and kangaroos all turning up in stock examples. Respect to anyone who can identify all of ’em, bonus points for references. [↪]
Comments
HPSG handles penguins & small giraffes. Makes sense to me.
[...] noted recently a certain zoological obsession on the part of formal semanticists. It’s not just formal [...]
The HPSG people choose cute animals for their examples. All the Spanish examples from Syntactic Theory (Sag-Wasow-Bender) involve penguins and giraffes... Small penguins and giraffes, if I may add.