Publication details

Acts, occasions and multiplicatives : A mereotopological account

Authors

WĄGIEL Marcin

Year of publication 2023
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 33
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
web https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/33.014
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/a5wn4f77
Keywords multiplicatives; event-internal/external quantification; acts; occasions; mereology; mereotopology
Description In this paper, I argue for the relevance of structured part-whole configurations in the domain of events. The evidence comes from the well-known event-internal/external distinction, which concerns mutliplicative adverbials quantifying either over separate occasions or occasion-internal acts, respectively (e.g., Cusic 1981, Andrews 1983, Cinque 1999, Zhang 2017). In order to capture this distinction, I postulate that the relationship between the two categories is based on a part-whole relation. In particular, inspired by proposals advocating the role of eventive higher-order units (Landman 2006, Henderson 2017) and building on the theories of (Grimm 2012) and (Mazzola 2019), I propose to extend mereotopology to the domain of events. I argue that this allows for capturing acts as simplex events conceptualized as bounded integrated MSSC wholes, whereas occasions as clusters, i.e., temporally structured configurations, of such simplex events.
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