A mereotopological account of the event-external/internal distinction
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | A sentence such as *The salesman rang the doorbell three times* is ambiguous between an event-external interpretation (quantification over so-called `occasions') and an event-internal interpretation (quantification over so-called `acts' within a single occasion) (e.g., Cinque 1999). In this talk, I argue that the event-external/internal distinction in English receives a straightforward explanation once mereotopological notions are extended to the domain of events. Mereotopology assumes parthood (the mereological component) as well as connectedness (the topological component) (Casati & Varzi 1999) and allows for distinguishing between units and structured configurations thereof. Building on the mereotopological 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 thereof (see also Landman 2004, Henderson 2017). |
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