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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $147.00

Format:
Hardback
336 pp.
156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198755128

Publication date:
April 2017

Imprint: OUP UK


Parts of a Whole

Distributivity as a Bridge between Aspect and Measurement

Lucas Champollion

Series : Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity.

In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above.

Readership : Researchers and students in the fields of semantics, theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, from graduate level upwards.

1. Overview
2. The stage
3. The cast of characters
4. The theory
5. Minimal parts
6. Aspect and space
7. Measure functions
8. Covert distributivity
9. Overt distributivity
10. Collectivity and cumulativity
11. Conclusion

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Lucas Champollion is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics (2010) and a M.Sc. in Computer and Information Science (2007), both from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining New York University in 2012, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. His work has appeared in journals such as Theoretical Linguistics, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Semantics and Pragmatics, and in edited volumes from CUP and Wiley.

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Special Features

  • Provides a clear and concise overview of existing work and relevant theoretical approaches.
  • Offers a unified account of three semantic domains that are usually studied separately.
  • Proposes an elegant new approach to the semantics of distributivity, aspect, and measurement.