Measurements, Numerals and Scales

This book brings together chapters on the semantics and pragmatics of measurement, scales, and numerical expressions. The chapters highlight recent developments in measurement theory, the meaning of numerical expressions and the relation between measurement scales and entailment scales. The authors provide explorations in formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, as well as at the interfaces of this field with others including philosophy of language and sociolinguistics. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in these areas, as well as psychology, psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence.

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Partitives, Comparatives and Proportional Measurement.- Chapter 3. Modified Numerals, Vagueness, and Scale Granularity.- Chapter 4. Uncertainty, quantity and relevance inferences from modified numerals.- Chapter 5. Around “around”.- Chapter 6. Evaluative intensification and positive polarity: Catalan WELL as a case study.- Chapter 7.  She is brilliant! Distinguishing different readings of relative adjectives.- Chapter 8. Numerals denote degree quantifiers: Evidence from child language.- Chapter 9. Number, Numbers and the Mass/Count Distinction in Daakie (Ambrym, Vanuatu).- Chapter 10. Representing measurement: The view from nominal polysemy.- Chapter 11. On the status of post-nominal Q superlatives in Romanian.- Chapter 12. Unknown numbers.- Chapter 13. Some speculative remarks on the semantics of money phrases.- Chapter 14. Quantifying the register of German quantificational expressions: A corpus based study.- Chapter 15. Domain-restrictedmeasure functions and the extent readings of relative measures.- Chapter 16. Amazing-hodo.- Chapter 17. A novel probabilistic approach to linguistic imprecision.- Chapter 18. Modification of measure nouns.