Prof. Coppock delivers keynote address at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024

Prof. Coppock was among the keynote speakers at Amsterdam Colloquium 2024.

Her talk was entitled “Metrology and Mereology”. Download the slides from the talk here.

Here is the abstract:

This talk is about metrology and mereology. Of these, the latter is more familiar to formal semanticist, and, in conjunction with event semantics, has been of use in analyzing distributivity constructions. The former is more distant territory to the formal semanticist. In metrology lives a community of metrologists who do ontological engineering and algebraic modelling that could be of use to us in laying down foundations for natural language semantics. This talk makes a plea (one I have made before) that it would indeed be of use to us semanticists to adopt a quantity calculus of the sort that has been developed in metrology. The talk also asks how such a system would interface with the rest of semantics. To approach this question, I present what I consider to be a cool fact, namely that arithmetic division and mereological division (assuming that is what is going on in distributivity constructions) can co-lexify in a single lexical item. We see this very clearly with Hungarian -nként, and also to some extent with English per. This suggests that mereological division and arithmetic division may be adjacent in conceptual space, and perhaps instances of a common idea. To explore how this might be so, I build a bridge between these two domains.