Parts and Wholes in Semantics (TOC)
Friederike Moltmann
March 2024 

This is the table of contents of Parts and Wholes in Semantics (OUP, 1997, 2003), for more details and access to an online copy please go to: http://www.friederike-moltmann.com/books/ The book presents a unified semantic theory of expressions involving the notions of part and whole. It develops a theory of part structures which differs from traditional extensional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions. The notion of an integrated whole includes that of a maximally self-connected entity, and thus the theory includes what has been called a 'mereotopological theory' (e.g. Grimm). The content of the mass-count distinction is given in terms of the notion of an integrated whole relative to a situation, which is, roughly, the intensional correlate of a contextually given set in various recent theories of the mass-count distinction (e.g. Rothstein). The book gives specific motivations for the situatedness of part structures relevant in the semantics of natural language: part-structure-semantic selection and distributivity, part-structure-sensitive perspective shifters ('whole', adnominal 'individual') and quantifiers involving a metric specification of part structures (e.g. 'several times'). This theory of situated part structures anticipates various current theoretical developments; a good part of the empirical data have not as yet received an alternative analysis.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007845 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Oxford University Press
keywords:	mereology, integrated whole, collective nouns, mass-count distinction, part-structure-sensitive perspective shifters, semantic selection, event quantifiers, frequency adverbials, distributivity, perspective shifters, as-phrases, multidimensional part structures semantics
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