Partitives, numerals and a unified part-whole structure
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In standard lattice-theoretic approaches to natural language (e.g., Link 1983, Landman 2000, Champollion 2017) singularities and pluralities are assumed to involve two distinct mereological structures and it is supposed that compositional semantics is not sensitive to the manner how parts of a whole are arranged. In this paper, I argue that: i) some quantificational operations including counting presuppose certain topological relations to hold within a part-whole structure and ii) quantification over parts and wholes are subject to identical restrictions. I present new evidence in favor of a mereotopological approach to nominal semantics (Grimm 2012) and novel data concerning the interaction between quantification and part-whole relations. |
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