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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:

  1. 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. [↪]
This was written by tikitu. Posted on Friday, February 6, 2009, at 6:56 pm. Tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. Ryszard Szopa wrote:

    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.

    Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 1:41 am | Permalink
  2. tikitu wrote:

    HPSG handles penguins & small giraffes. Makes sense to me.

    Sunday, February 8, 2009 at 2:38 pm | Permalink

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