Event-external/internal quantification: A mereotopological account
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In this talk, I combine three strands of the recent research on the distinction between event-external and event-internal quantification (i.e., quantification over acts and occasions, respectively) in order to provide a novel account for the cross-linguistic facts. The first strand concerns typological generalizations concerning the syntactic and morphological expression of acts and occasions in three types of languages exemplified by English, Polish and Mandarin Chinese. The second strand regards the relationship between the two postulated categories, which remains unclear since both seem to fall into the ontological class of eventualities. Finally, I extend mereotopology in order to capture the semantic nature of the distinction. The proposed model combines novel cross-linguistic observations with well-known ontological considerations and recent developments in modeling part-whole structures in natural language. |
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