Functional units and functional clusters
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Since Link (1983), the general trend in the research on part-whole structures has been to extend the notion of pluralities from the domain of individuals to other (more abstract) domains including events (Bach 1986), information states (Krifka 1996), times (Artstein & Francez 2003) and degrees (Dotlačil & Nouwen 2016) as well as propositions (Lahiri 2002), questions (Beck & Sharvit 2002) and functions (Schmitt 2019). On the other hand, in recent years more and more attention has been dedicated to configurations involving structured parthood, where the relationship between parts within the whole is relevant. The phenomena studied so far include, e.g., collective-singulative number systems and aggregate nouns (Grimm 2012), atomizers (Scontras 2014), quantity judgments concerning notional mass nouns (Lima 2014) and entity partitives (Wągiel 2018). Combining the two sets of results described above invites a question whether and (if so) to what extent structured part-whole configurations can also be found in abstract domains. In this talk, I will explore several empirical areas and suggest how mereotopological notions could be extended to abstract objects with the focus on the concept of function/role. In particular, I will discuss the distinction between spatial and social collectives, the distribution of spatial and social singulatives in Slavic as well as artifact nouns including object mass nouns. |
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