Part-Whole Structure and its Reflection in Natural Language

It has long been recognized that mereological relations play an important role in the semantics of natural language. In particular, it has become standard to make use of extensional mereology for the semantics of mass and plural nouns, conjunction, as well as various part-related expressions. Extensional mereology contrasts with integrity-based approaches to part-whole structure on which conditions defining an entity as an integrated whole play a central role in part-whole structures as well. Integrity-based approaches go back as far as Aristotle, but have gained increasing interest among semanticists as well since work by cognitive semanticists such Langacker and Jackendoff as well as Moltmann in the late eighties and nineties. Conditions of integrity, such as maximal connectedness, have been argued to matter for the choice of count categories, the semantics of classifier-like expressions, part-whole related expressions relating to individuals, and possessor constructions (e.g. the light verb HAVE). The notion of an integrated whole also matters for the semantics of intensional verbs of absence such as is missing and lack. The use of mereology in semantics has also faced serious criticism, though. For example, logicians like Yi, McKay, Oliver and Smiley have pointed out limits of mereology for the semantics of plurals, arguing that plurals do not stand for mereological sums, but for pluralities ‘as many’. Mereological accounts of mass nouns likewise face difficulties in that mass nouns do not seem stand for quantities as single entities, but for things that count as neither one nor many.

This workshop brings together new empirical and conceptual work relating to part-whole structure with its reflection in different linguistic phenomena. This includes typological work on classifiers and other part-whole related expressions, syntactic constructions pertaining to parts of a whole (such as verbs of possession and absence), notions of integrated wholes of mereotopological and functional sorts and their linguistic application, developments of plural reference and sui generis mass reference, and generalized non-boolean approaches to conjunction.