Semantics circle: Polysemous Abstract Nouns: Categorisation and Individuation

Abstract

In this talk, I briefly introduce the goals of my new DFG project Nouns in Contexts of Evaluation (NiCE) that started in April 2025. Thereafter, I report on initial work on this project relating to categorising and analysing the individuation criteria of abstract polysemous nouns.

The NiCE project investigates how lexically encoded semantic information (individuation criteria), compositional semantics (modification), and pragmatics interact. Modifiers affect the truth conditions of common nouns, and wider contextual factors such as the QUD can also affect their interpretations. However, as this project will investigate, modifiers can also affect the individuation criteria of common nouns in highly context dependent ways. Focus is on three types of contextual variation: nominal domain restriction, variation in counting perspectives, and individuation criteria for polysemous nouns. As I discuss, these three types of context sensitivity are intertwined, can block one another and display interactions with the QUD.

The initial phase of this project is aimed at better demarcating the empirical landscape for polysemous abstract nouns. In the polysemy literature especially, relatively few nouns (e.g., lunch, book, newspaper and school) have been a locus of investigation. I present the initial findings of corpus- and semantic test-based approaches to classifying the different senses of polysemous nouns with the goal of broadening the dataset and providing at least partial answers to the following questions: What kinds of entities do abstract nouns denote? To what extent do abstract nouns form a unified class and are there differences between subclasses of them that can be distinguished in terms of grammatical reflexes? How are entities in the denotations of abstract nouns individuated in, for instance, numeral constructions?

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