Publication details
Part-whole structures
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The category of part-whole is one of the key cognitive notions in human mind. In this class, we will explore various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language. I will investigate syntactic constructions and lexical categories that encode different kinds of part-whole structures across languages, e.g., partitives, plurals, proportional quantifiers, whole-adjectives, collective nouns and singulatives. For instance, I will explore how `Half the flag is red' differs semantically from `A/One half of the flag is red' (Wągiel 2018) and consider why `I raked the leaves into a pile' is felicitous, whereas `#I raked the foliage into a pile' is not (Grimm 2012). I will compare two theories of parts and wholes, specifically standard mereology introduced to linguistics in the seminal paper by Link (1983) and a newer development called mereotopology, which extends mereology with topological notions such as connectedness, and thus enables for modelling different kinds of spatial configurations within a part-whole structure (Grimm 2021, Lima 2014, Scontras 2014, Wągiel 2018, 2021, Igel 2021). As a result, a mereotopological approach will allow us to distinguish ontologically between three types of entities: integrated wholes (e.g., the referents of the singular count noun `pebble') arbitrary sums (e.g., the referents of the plural nouns `pebbles') and clusters, i.e., pluralities structured in a particular topological configurations (e.g., the typical referents of the granular noun `gravel'). Finally, I will consider part-whole structures in more abstract domains including eventualities and roles. |
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