Mereotopological part-whole structures in nominal semantics

Abstract

Standard approaches to expressions describing part-whole structures in natural language are grounded in classical mereology, which is built upon the notion of parthood that is unstructured, i.e., there is no ontological difference between the whole and the sum of its parts. This fact drew criticism with regard to the conceptual foundations of such approaches since they seem to neglect the fact that different configurations of the same parts might give rise to different wholes (see Simons 1987, Casati & Varzi 1999, Varzi 2007). Furthermore, since Grimm (2012) the research on nominal semantics has revealed more and more evidence for the linguistic relevance of structured parthood (see also Moltmann 1997), i.e., part-whole configurations in which the arrangement of parts does matter. In this talk, I will discuss a number of linguistic phenomena in the nominal domain calling for a mereotopological analysis that captures not only part-whole but also spatial relations holding between parts within the whole (mereotopology is a theory of parts and wholes that extends mereology with topology, see Casati & Varzi 1999, Varzi 2007). First, I will consider lexical expressions and grammatical devices employed to designate objects conceptualized as integrated wholes. These include singular count nouns (Grimm 2012), certain part-whole modifiers (Wągiel 2018, Igel 2021, Schvarcz & Wohlmuth 2021), atomizers (Lima 2014, Scontras 2014) and singulatives (Grimm 2012, Wągiel & Shlikhutka 2023, Kagan 2024). Furthermore, I will discuss linguistic means to describe objects conceptualized as clusters, i.e., topologically structured pluralities. The relevant expressions include aggregates (Grimm 2012, Sutton & Filip 2021), collectives (Grimm & Dočekal 2021, Wągiel 2021) and clustered plurals (Wągiel 2018, Gréa 2023). Based on the results so far, I will propose a typology of nominal predicates that is intended to capture how relevant mereotopological notions are reflected in language.