The genitive ratio and its applications

unless there is a specific statement to the contrary. The three categories – animate, concrete, abstract are not discrete. They are rendered porous by the polysemy of the English language. A common example is the noun chair, which might be concrete (an item of furniture) or animate (the person responsible for the process of a meeting). Connell and Lynott (2012: 461) cite substitute and kingdom as examples of words that occupy a polysemous middle ground somewhere between concrete and abstract. Whilst not invalidating the utility of the genitive ratio, polysemy and other linguistic confounds ensure that it can never be absolute. The genitive ratio model is probabilistic, and probabilistic means uncertain. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rosen (2014) concludes that "The abstract/concrete distinction ... is of fundamental importance. And yet there is no standard account of how it should be drawn". Hale (1988) makes an attempt,