Partitives, multipliers and subatomic quantification
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In this paper, I provide novel evidence for subatomic quantification in natural language. In particular, I present the data regarding the interaction between cardinal numerals and partitives involving irregular plurals in Italian, distinct classes of Polish 'half' words as well as multipliers such as English 'double'. I argue that the evidence calls for a mereotopological analysis of nominal semantics and postulate three general principles related to countability: i) natural language is sensitive to topological relations holding between parts of singularities, ii) there are general counting rules that presuppose such relations, and iii) quantification over parts is subject to identical restrictions as quantification over wholes. |
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