Event-internal and external quantification and the mereotopology of events
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Kim knocked on the door three times is ambiguous between an event-external interpretation (quantification over "occasions") and an event-internal interpretation (quantification over "acts" within a single occasion) (e.g., Cusic 1981, Andrews 1983, Cinque 1999). Polish and Mandarin Chinese mark the distinction formally via dedicated multiplicatives and distinct verbal classifiers (e.g., Donazzan 2013, Zhang 2017). Still, the relationship between occasions and acts remains unclear since both seem to fall into the ontological category of eventualities. In this talk, I argue that the event-external/internal distinction receives a straightforward explanation once the mereotopological notion of connectedness (Casati & Varzi 1999) is extended to the domain of events. Building on the theory of time by Mazzola (2019), I propose that event-internal interpretations concern quantification over simplex singular eventualities, whereas event-external readings concern counting clusters, i.e., structured configurations, thereof (see also Landman 2004, Henderson 2017). |
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