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Abstract We investigate the semantics of continuous quantities such as colour and shape as they occur in natural languages. To do so, we introduce a mathematical framework which allows us to define semantics uniformly across different continuous quantities. The original motivation for this was the analysis of texts in descriptive sciences and we begin a series of experiments testing proposed semantic interpretations against these texts and the natural phenomena being described. Finally, we describe applications of the semantics in information extraction and integration. 1 Introduction Natural languages are finitary, in having a finite (if changing) vocabulary and a finite number offormation rules for sentences, whereas the physical world appears to be continuous. One of the