Parts and Wholes in Semantics

269 Pages·1997·13.39 MB·English

by  Friederike Moltmann

Parts and Wholes in Semantics
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Parts and Wholes
in Semantics
FRIEDERIKE MOLTMANN
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1997
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1997 by Friederike Moltmann
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moltmann, Friederike.
Parts and whole in semantics / Friederike Moltmann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBNO-19-509574-X
1. Semantics. 2. Whole and parts (Philosophy) I. Title.
P325.M59 1997
401'.43 — dc20 96-9891
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
The relation between parts and wholes plays an important role in the way we con-
ceive of things. Different kinds of entities have different kinds of part structure: arti-
facts and organisms have parts which have a particular function within the whole;
quantities of water have subquantities as parts; groups of entities (like groups of
tables, people, events, or facts) have group members or subgroups as parts; and
events, states, and actions may have other events, states, or actions as parts. When
using natural language, we often refer to things and say something about their parts
or the integrity of the whole.
The goal of this book is to show that very general notions of part and whole
play a pervasive role in the semantics of natural languages and are crucial in the
understanding of a broad range of phenomena. The notions of part and whole are
involved in the mass-count distinction, in various quantificational constructions, in
distributive interpretations of predicates, and in the lexical meaning of many ex-
pressions in various natural languages. In this book, I argue that a particular notion
of part structure is relevant in natural language semantics. This notion is novel in
two general respects. First, it is not generally transitive, closed under sum forma-
tion, and extensional (identifying entities that have the same parts). The reason for
this, basically, is that this notion involves the concept of integrated whole in certain
ways. Second, part structures, under the new notion, are context-dependent or vari-
able. On the one hand, this means that an entity may have different part structures
in different situations. On the other hand, it means that an entity may have differ-
ent part structures in different (temporal, spatial, qualitative, or object-induced) di-
mensions. The variability of part structures, as I will argue, is the source of system-
atic apparent ambiguities in a broad range of natural language constructions involving
the parts of an entity. Moreover, it plays a role in particular semantic selectional
restrictions of predicates and semantic operations.
The notion of part structure as it is conceived in this book deviates in funda-
mental ways from traditional notions of part structure, those common both in phi-
losophy and in linguistic semantics. According to the traditional view, part struc-
tures are not variable; rather, an entity has exactly one part structure in all contexts.
Moreover, the part relation in, at least, most recent traditions in philosophy and lin-
guistics generally is an extensional notion — that is, a set-theoretic or extensional
mereological notion.
Besides providing a theory of part structures for natural language and a general
vi Preface
framework for formally analyzing part-structure-related phenomena, this book
establishes a number of results that are of independent interest. One of them con-
cerns the status of situations. A part structure of the sort relevant in natural lan-
guage semantics is relative to a situation, where such a situation may be either a par-
ticular situation the speaker refers to or a situation that is described by the sentence.
Hence the semantically relevant part structures are situated part structures. Since
such situated part structures determine the availability of distributive interpretations
of predicates and the satisfaction of semantic selectional requirements, this leads to
the view that predicates do not take entities as arguments, but rather pairs consist-
ing of an entity and a situation. Correspondingly, every noun phrase will denote not
a single entity, but rather a pair consisting of an entity and what I call a 'reference
situation' (or, given the generalized-quantifier treatment of noun phrase denotations,
it will denote a set of sets of pairs consisting of entities and situations).
Two other claims made in this book concern the mass-count distinction. First,
the mass-count distinction as a syntactic distinction between nominal categories is
independent of the semantic mass-count distinction in the following way: there are
expressions that apply to both mass nouns and count nouns but have a lexical mean-
ing that specifies the part structure of an entity as that of a group, rather than a
quantity. Second, the mass category is—both syntactically and semantically—the
unmarked category among the categories singular count, plural, and mass. Two
examples from English indicate that if a category does not have a mass-count dis-
tinction, it will count as a mass, rather than a count, category: verbs (with respect
to the Davidsonian event-argument place) and clauses.
This book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 gives a general outline of the theory of
situated part structures with its most important empirical motivations; it is supple-
mented by an appendix discussing in greater detail some related proposals in the
previous literature. Chapter 2 presents the formal semantic framework that is used
in the subsequent chapters; it also gives a treatment of distributivity, a central phe-
nomenon among part-whole phenomena in natural language. The following chapters
treat the various empirical subject matters. Chapter 3 is about what I call 'part-
structure-sensitive semantic selection'—that is, semantic restrictions imposed by
predicates, readings of a predicate, or semantic operations on the part structure of
an argument. It also gives a semantic analysis of what I call 'perspective shifters',
expressions such as as a teacher and as a whole in adnominal position. This is
because part-structure-sensitive perspective shifters such as as a whole, together,
individual, and whole interact in certain ways with part-structure-sensitive seman-
tic selection. Chapter 4 treats various phenomena displaying an interaction between
quantification and part structures. It gives new analyses of plural and mass quanti-
fiers such as all, many, and much, and discusses quantifiers ranging over the parts
of an argument (e.g., all and whole). Chapter 5 analyzes certain classes of expres-
sions that specify part structures independently of the categories mass and count,
namely frequency expressions (e.g.,frequent(ly) and rare(ly)) and certain metrical
and vague determiners in German. Chapter 6 is about expressions involving part
structures that are relativized to a particular dimension: first, part-structure modi-
fiers such as together, alone, as a whole, individually in adverbial position; second,
Preface vii
expressions of completion such as completely and partially in various languages;
and third, quantifiers ranging over the parts of a concrete event, such as simultane-
ously and same/different in the internal reading. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the
mass-count distinction when applied to verbs and clauses.
Only the first chapter and, to some extent, the second chapter are presupposed
by the subsequent chapters. Any among Chapters 3-7 may be read more or less inde-
pendently of the others.
Acknowledgments
Many people have been of help at various stages of this book. In particular, it has
profited from comments from the audiences of presentations at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, Stanford University, the Uni-
versity of Southern California in Los Angeles, the Conference on Language and
Logic in Tucson, 1989, and the Workshop 'Formal Mereology and Conceptual Part-
Whole Theories' at the European Artificial Intelligence Conference (EAIC) in Ams-
terdam, 1994, and the participants of my course 'Complex Part Structures and Nat-
ural Language' at the Seventh European Summer School in Logic, Language and
Information in Barcelona, 1995. For discussions or comments on parts of earlier
versions of the manuscript, I would like to thank in particular Renate Bartsch, Kit
Fine, Irene Heim, Jim Higginbotham, Eid Keenan, Stanley Peters, Barry Schein,
Barry Smith, Martin Stokhof, and the referee for Oxford University Press. For tech-
nical help with the preparation of the manuscript, I would like to thank Mark Brand.
Finally, I wish to thank my father for his support over many years.
New York City F.M.
March 1997
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1. Part structures in the semantics of natural language 1
1.2. The analogy between the semantics of plural, mass, and singular
count noun phrases 6
1.3. The traditional view of part structures 11
1.4. The mass-count distinction: the extensional mereological account 16
1.5. A new notion of part structure for natural language 19
1.5.1. The information-based account of the mass-count distinction 20
1.5.2. Characterizations of integrated wholes 26
1.5.3. Formal properties of part structures 27
1.5.4. Situated part structures 29
1.6. Summary 35
Appendix: Comparison with other approaches 35
1 A. 1. Notions related to the notion of integrated whole in other semantic
approaches 36
1A.2. The notion of integrated whole and the notion of sortal concept 37
1A.3. Related approaches to the mass-count distinction 39
2 The Formal Semantic Framework
and the Treatment of Distributivity 40
2.1. General issues concerning sentence meaning 40
2.2. Compositional situation semantics for simple constructions 43
2.3. The treatment of distributivity 48
2.3.1. The problem of distributivity and types of distributivity
phenomena 49
2.3.2. Ways of treating distributivity 51
2.3.3. An account of distributivity based on situated part structures and
disjunctive lexical meanings 55
3 Semantic Selection, Part Structures,
and Perspectives 61
3.1. The Accessibility Requirement 62
3.1.1. The basic data and the generalization 62
3.1.2. Semantic selection and perspectives 69