Academic Journal
Degrees of Countability: A Mereotopological Approach to the Mass/Count Distinction
| العنوان: | Degrees of Countability: A Mereotopological Approach to the Mass/Count Distinction |
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| المؤلفون: | Grimm, Scott |
| المصدر: | Semantics and Linguistic Theory; Proceedings of SALT 22; 584–603 ; 2163-5951 |
| بيانات النشر: | Linguistic Society of America |
| سنة النشر: | 2012 |
| المجموعة: | Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America) |
| مصطلحات موضوعية: | count/mass, mereology, topology, collective, singulative, Welsh |
| الوصف: | Most formal semantic treatments of countability aim to account for a binary count/non-count distinction through the use of mereology, or part-structures. This paper discusses data from Welsh, which possesses three categories of grammatical number, distinguishing a collective/singulative class under which fall entity types such as 'collective aggregates' (swarming insects, vegetation) and 'granular aggregates' (sand). I show that standard mereological accounts turn out not to be sufficiently expressive to account for this broader typological data. I then argue that it is necessary to enrich mereology with connection relations that model ways in which the referents of nouns may come together, resulting in the more expressive mereotopology. I show that this extension leads to faithfully modeling the degrees of countability found in Welsh and overcomes well-known problems for classical mereological accounts, e.g., the "minimal parts" problem. |
| نوع الوثيقة: | article in journal/newspaper |
| وصف الملف: | application/pdf |
| اللغة: | English |
| Relation: | http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/2633/2380; http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/2633 |
| DOI: | 10.3765/salt.v22i0.2633 |
| الاتاحة: | http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/2633 https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v22i0.2633 |
| رقم الانضمام: | edsbas.FF45096 |
| قاعدة البيانات: | BASE |
| DOI: | 10.3765/salt.v22i0.2633 |
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