Forests and Trees: the Formal Semantics of Collective Categorization (ROCKY) is an ERC Advanced Grant project that is carried out at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS. This project aims to develop a novel theory on the linguistic ability to conceptualize collections, applied to a wide range of empirical phenomena and interdisciplinary challenges in computational semantics and comparative linguistics, benefiting from the recent synergy between linguistics and the psychology of concepts.

• Giada Palmieri MA
• Imke Kruitwagen MA
• prof. dr. Yoad Vinter Seggev
• dr. Sofia Nikiforova MA

Articles and bare nominals are often in complementary distribution. English tolerates bare plurals and bare mass nouns (buy apples, drink milk), but not generally bare count singulars (*buy book), except in special configurations like at school, in bed, without anchor), in which the bare nominal is not so much to refer to a concrete individual, but rather to describe properties, types, conventional situations, etc. The use of articles in such weakly referential constructions is often variable within one language (be chair of the committee vs. be a professor), as well as across languages (be a professor - être professeur). The project works out three complementary questions in relation to the distribution and meaning of weakly referential expressions:

(i) weakly referential nominals: lexicon and constructions. Research on classes of nouns and weakly referential configurations.

(ii) Weakly referential nominals: meaning and comprehension. Online/offline experimental investigation on the way in which weakly referential nominals are understood.

(iii) Cross-linguistic distribution of weakly referential nominals. Corpus research on different languages and parallel corpora (English, Romance, Germanic) provides the data for projects (i) and (ii), as well as the generalizations that support information extraction, computer aided translation and natural language processing.

• prof. dr. Martin Everaert
• prof. dr. Henriette de Swart
• dr. Bert Le Bruyn

This project was a collaboration between the universities of Groningen (Petra Hendriks), Nijmegen (Helen de Hoop) and Utrecht (Henriette de Swart). It aimed at the further development of semantic research in Optimality Theory, as initiated by Hendriks & de Hoop (2001) and de Hoop & de Swart (2000). It ultimately developed into a broad range of applications of bidirectional Optimality Theory from lexicon to discourse, with implications for the syntax-semantics interface, typology, language acquisition and a new perspective on language in higher cogntion in Hendriks, Kramer, de Hoop, de Swart & Zwarts (2010).

• prof. dr. Henriette de Swart