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Labex PLU |
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Labex PLU |
Le séminaire du groupe de travail Pluralité et
Quantification, se réunit dorénavant dans le cadre du projet
Labex PLU - Plurality and Individuation of Reference, et se
tiendra dans les locaux de l'UFR de Linguistique de l'Université
Paris 7, 175 rue du Chevaleret, 75013 salle D401 (Salle du Conseil).
Calendrier : le Jeudi de 14h00 à 16h00.
Responsables : Marta Donazzan et Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin
Abstract : We will discuss the advantages and the shortcomings of some of the most recent propositions concerning homogeneity and countability in the verbal domain, comparing in particular Rothstein's (2004) proposal about VP lexical structure and Landman & Rothstein's analysis of incremental homogeneity and nominal reference (Landman & Rothstein 2010 and Landman & Rothstein 2011a,b).
Rothstein, S. (2004) Structuring events Oxford: Blackwell
Landman & Rothstein (2010) Incremental homogeneity and the felicity of aspectual FOR-phrases. In M. Rapapport Hovav, I. Sichel, and E. Doron (Eds.), Syntax, Lexical Semantics and Event Structure. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
Landman, F. and S. Rothstein (2011a,b). The felicity of aspectual for-phrases. part 1 : homogeneity/ Part 2: Incremental homogeneity. In Language and Linguistics Compass. Oxford : Blackwell-Wiley.
Abstract : This paper argues that collective terms (such as that pack of dogs or that pile of dishes) and the corresponding individual terms (i.e. those dogs and those dishes) denote the same individual; in other words, that a morphologically singular collective term denotes a plural individual. This `coreferentiality hypothesis' is the null hypothesis, since it doesn't require any enrichment of the ontology with new individuals, such as Link's (1984) `impure atoms', Landman's (1989a) `groups' or Schwarzschild's (1996) `bunches'. The argument in favor of this coreferentiality hypothesis is twofold. On the one hand, I note that the replacement of a collective term with the corresponding individual term (and vice versa) most often doesn't affect neither truth-conditions nor grammaticality, even in cases of distributive predication. As distributive predication is peculiar to plural-denoting terms, a collective term should therefore denote a plural individual. On the other hand, I show how to account under this coreferentiality hypothesis for some linguistic evidence that at first sight seems to point against it. I consider two such linguistic facts: predicate non-sharing between a collective term and the corresponding individual term and the special behavior of collective terms with reciprocals. The apparent paradox of a morphologically singular collective term denoting a plural individual is resolved with a new semantics for number morphology.