Slavic derived collective nouns as spatial and social clusters

In this chapter, I examine two types of Slavic derived collective nouns, namely
spatial collectives such as Polish kwiecie ‘clump of flowers’ and social collectives like
duchowieństwo ‘collective of priests, clergy’. While the former refer to collections
of objects perceived as coherent spatial configurations, the latter denote groups of
human individuals performing a salient social role. Building on Grimm (2012) and
Zobel (2017), I propose an analysis that treats the Slavic derived collective nouns in
question as predicates true of spatial and social clusters, respectively. The proposal
extends mereotopology to the abstract domain of social roles.