Multiplicatives, verbal classifiers and event-external/internal quantification
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In this paper, I argue for the mereotopological treatment of structured parthood in the domain of events. The main puzzle concerns the event-external/internal distinction, i.e., a phenomenon in which multiplicative adverbials count either separate occasions or occasion-internal acts, respectively (e.g., Cusic 1981, Andrews 1983, Cinque 1999). The key evidence comes from verbal classifier constructions in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Donazzan 2013, Zhang 2017, Ye & Guo 2023, Guo 2024). In order to capture the data, I propose a part-whole-based approach inspired by analyses employing eventive higher-order units (Landman 2006, Henderson 2017). Building on the theory of Grimm (2012), I postulate to extend mereotopology to the domain of events and to distinguish formally between simplex events and eventive clusters. |
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