Abstract
In this chapter I offer some speculative remarks on the semantics of what I refer to as money phrases, e.g., five dollars. Money phrases have some intriguing properties that make their precise semantics tricky to pin down: sometimes they seem to denote degrees (e.g. of expensiveness or value), sometimes concrete objects like cash, and sometimes abstract purchasing power. Determining a basic semantics for money phrases is further complicated by their typical use in constructions pertaining to ownership, which pose their own independent problems. After discussing these three uses for money phrases, I offer a tentative means by which these uses may be semantically unified.
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Notes
- 1.
For types \(\alpha \) and \(\beta \), \(\alpha \beta \) is the type of functions from \(\alpha \) to \(\beta \). Types are right-associative: \(\alpha \beta \gamma \) is what would traditionally be written as \(\langle \alpha ,\langle \beta ,\gamma \rangle \rangle \).
- 2.
I assume that measure phrases like two kilos denote degrees, hence type d; an equally plausible alternative is that they are degree quantifiers of type (dt)t (Schwarzschild and Wilkinson 2002; Pasternak and Sauerland to appear). For our purposes this choice is immaterial: either way, measure phrases have denotations that fundamentally trade in degrees.
- 3.
Note that if \(\text {APP}\) is closed under mereological sum, then the prediction is that money should have the syntactic-semantic properties of a mass noun, a fact that is borne out. That said, there is also a somewhat formal use of the plural monies, meaning sums of money. It could be that this apparent count use is derived from mass money, perhaps through coercion. However, it is worth noting that #a money, #two monies, etc. are unacceptable, suggesting a somewhat more complicated picture.
- 4.
One potentially strange property of the definition in (26) is that it requires that, for example, a ten dollar bill be imbued not just with ten dollars of purchasing power, but with some specific ten-dollar lump of purchasing power. It is unclear to me whether this is a good thing or not, but if not then one way of resolving this could be through the aforementioned phenomenon of opaque possession: a ten dollar bill opaquely possesses ten dollars of abstract purchasing power in the same way that Mats opaquely owns 75% of the ball bearings in (20).
- 5.
Rick Nouwen (p.c.) notes that this does not hold for quarter: in order for Sara handed me three quarters to be true, she cannot have handed me 75 cents in nickels. This can perhaps be explained by positing that the lexical semantics for quarter, unlike dollar, is based on its concrete entity interpretation, with other interpretations being derived from that; in this case the fact that three quarters means three individual quarters falls out from a standard semantics for plurals and numerals. This analysis in turn suggests the intriguing possibility of a semantic typology for money-related nouns, a matter I leave for future work.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussion, many thanks to Kai von Fintel, Rick Nouwen, Giorgos Spathas, and Ildikó Emese Szabó. I look forward to bothering Stephanie Solt about these problems in the future.
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Pasternak, R. (2022). Some Speculative Remarks on the Semantics of Money Phrases. In: Gotzner, N., Sauerland, U. (eds) Measurements, Numerals and Scales. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73323-0_13
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