The perception and cognitive processing of the world is not always clear. That’s why we see two gestalts in a flip-flop image, and people differ in conceptualizing one and the same condition (e.g. German Lebensgefahr ‘risk of life’ vs. French danger de mort ‘risk of death’). The present study investigates this “ambiguity of things” in collectives and pairs, which also display two competing conceptualizations: is a forest rather a whole or a multiplicity of trees? The study systematically describes the linguistic variations resulting from this ambiguity. It particularly consists in • the modelling of collections and pairs as a universal problem that, however, is reflected differently in specific languages (such as French, Italian, and Spanish). • the qualitative and quantitative analysis of relevant phenomena in grammar (syntactic concord, nominal determination) and lexicon (collective nouns). • an emphasis on the diachronic perspective: the study leads to a typology of language change patterns that involve collective or dual stages.weiterlesen