Degrees of Countability: A Mereotopological Approach to the Mass/Count Distinction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v22i0.2633Keywords:
count/mass, mereology, topology, collective, singulative, WelshAbstract
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.Downloads
Published
2012-09-03
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Articles appearing in SALT are published under an author agreement with the Linguistic Society of America and are made available to readers under a Creative Commons Attribution License.