Publication details

The linguistic relevance of the distinction between spatial and social collections

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Authors

WĄGIEL Marcin

Year of publication 2022
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference NELS 52 : Proceedings of the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 3
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web Domovský web publikační řady NELS nakladatelství GLSA
Keywords collective nouns; spatial collectives; social collectives; part-whole structures; mereotopology; roles
Description In this paper, I examine empirical foundations for distinguishing between two types of collective nouns, namely spatial collectives such as ‘stack of plates’ and social collectives like ‘committee of experts’. I revise a battery of tests proposed in the literature to distinguish between the two. I conclude that many of those tests fail since they neglect the intervening factor of (in)animacy, but there are some diagnostics that are reliable, and thus the distinction is linguistically relevant. Finally, I demonstrate that Slavic derivational morphology is sensitive to the spatial/social distinction.
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