Structured parthood in natural language
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
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| Description | Standard approaches to expressions describing part-whole structures in language are grounded in classical mereology, which is built upon the notion of parthood. In this talk, I will argue that this is not enough to capture certain linguistic data. I will discuss a number of linguistic phenomena in the nominal domain calling for an analysis that captures not only part-whole relations but also topological arrangement of parts within a whole. Among others, I will investigate entity partitives such `a half of that apple', Slavic spatial collective nouns, e.g., Czech list `a leaf' `-> listí `foliage', and singulatives, e.g., Ukrainian grad `hail' ~ hradyna `a hailstone', as well as Italian irregular plurals, e.g., osso `a bone' ~ ossi `bones' ~ ossa `(connected) bones (as in a skeleton)'. I will demonstrate that all of these phenomena can be captured if one adopts a more powerful theory of parts and wholes compared to mereology. This theory is called mereotopology and it combines standard mereology with topological notions such as connectedness that allow for modeling various spatial configurations of entities. |
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