Annihilating atoms with entity partitives
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In standard theories of pluralities and countability, the mass/count distinction is often formulated in terms of atomicity (e.g., Link 1983, Landman 1991, 2000, Chierchia 1998, 2010, Champollion 2017). Despite significant differences in particular theories, the contrast between count and mass nouns usually boils down to the (non-)existence of minimal building blocks in their denotations or, alternativley, to a distinct nature of those building blocks. The approach developed in this talk rejects the view that what counts as `one' is best represented as an atomic entity. Instead, building on a mereotopological approach to nominal semantics (Grimm 2012, see also Casati & Varzi 1999) I propose that countability is a feature of individuals that constitute non-overlapping and integrated wholes (as opposed to, e.g., scattered entities and arbitrary sums). The evidence comes from entity partitives involving numerical quantification over material parts of referents of concrete count singular NPs, e.g., *three parts of the teddy bear*. First, I will present the problem such constructions pose for atomicity-based approaches to the mass/count distinction. Next, I will discuss two attempts to account for that problem, i.e., the theories of Chierchia (2010) and Landman (2016), and point what I believe to be their shortcomings. Then, I will argue for two claims, specifically (i) having a notion of atomicity is not enough for a full analysis of entity partitives and (ii) atomicity is actually not needed for that purpose since it can be replaced by mereotopological notions which are required independently. Finally, I will discuss independent cognitive evidence which seems to support my approach. |
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